Civil Rights Cold Case #8 (Or a Christmas Premonition)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Civil Rights Cold Case #8 (Or a Christmas Premonition)
I
In the photo on the FBI reward poster Mrs. Moore’s hair is pulled away from her face like a curtain, revealing her suspicions. Her mouth is held as firmly as when she teaches her colored pupils their ABCs. Shifted to the right, her eyes look past the shimmer of Christmas gifts. Past the sparkle of ornaments that decorate a freshly cut spruce. Past the glare of a camera’s flash; past the moment when she is beckoned to smile though she knows death is coming.
II
Early Christmas morning, a bomb ticks beneath floorboards of the home her husband built. She stirs and looks at Harry once more. Death wraps around them, a quilt exploding like sunrise in a darkened sky. [End Page 896]
Lolita Stewart-White, a Cave Canem fellow, is a winner of the Fred Shaw Poetry Contest of the Academy of American Poets, as well as a semi-finalist in the Boston Review Discovery Poetry Competition. She has published poems in Rattle, African Voices, and Iowa Review. Her films have been exhibited at the Los Angeles Pan African Film and Arts Festival and the Seattle Langston Hughes’s African-American Film Festival. Most recently she was named the winner of “Pitch Miami” sponsored by the Women’s International Film Festival.
Footnotes
* For Harriette and Harry Moore, Civil Rights Activists of Mims, Florida, 1951.
