Artist Statement: This is a poem about me grappling with the layers of feeling that have come up as I’ve looked into my lineage, and our nation’s history with slavery, genocide, and witch hunts.

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“This is a crime story in a large and violent place. Too large for subject and object. Only a few of her captors have names. Nearly all of their names are wrong. Anyway, by 1676 most of them are gone.”

— Susan Howe, from “The Birth-mark” regarding the kidnapping of Mary Rowlandson, a Massachusetts Bay colonist, by Native Americans 

In the official grammar of this nation
One performs the action
& the Other receives it
but
heavy water ancestors
breathe beneath this
ship hull of injury
pull us into new life with them

I keep thinking of the schooner named Clotilda
which carried the last Africans
to America to be sold as slaves in 1859,
more than 50 years after
their import had been banned.
A white man had made a bet
that he could defy the law, & did.
Thus the ancestors of Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
were stolen from their lives & forced to work the Alabama soil
for their captors until the end of the Civil War.
Though they had only been away for 5 years
when freedom came, they could not afford return passage.
They stayed and created a place called Africatown
where they practiced their cultural ways
and made lives for themselves and their descendants.
The band we now know and love as The Roots
would never have existed without this outrage.

This is a crime story in a large and violent place.
Too large for subject and object.

I keep thinking of the black & white photo
of my father, sister, and I,
in costume at Six Flags Over Texas.
He’s wearing a Confederate uniform,
she & I dressed as Southern Belles.
It was probably 1985. I had no idea what the
costumes meant, just that they were “old,”
that we were having fun with our often-absent daddy.
I’ll never know if a Union costume was offered
— if my father decided on grey over blue —
I only know it’s one of the last photographs I have
of us, together, before he died of an overdose
and left us too soon.

This is a crime story in a large and violent place.
Too large for subject and object.

I keep thinking of the women being displaced
in Ghana, currently living in witch camps
to avoid being killed by their communities
who’ve been pushed to the brink of starvation
by western “development.”
Most of the accused are widows, elder women
seen as useless and taking up land that others want
& also need.
Witch hunts are not native to Africa,
they arrived with colonization.
There are now over 1,000 women living in these camps.
If they try to go home
they’ll be murdered
as many already have been.

This is a crime story in a large and violent place.
Too large for subject and object.

I keep thinking of my ancestor, Isham Puckett,
who applied, as a supposed Union sympathizer
(and perhaps he was, but his son fought for the Confederacy)
to the Southern Claims Commission in 1871
to receive damages from the US government
after the Civil War ravaged the south.
Whole towns had to figure out how they would carry on
while northern cities saw massive industries rise
and their wealth exponentially grow during the Gilded Age.
I’ve not yet discovered why, but Isham’s claim was denied.
In total, only 32% of the claims were approved.
There is a righteous indignation
that some white Southerners express
about the way they have been treated.
They are not right about their grievances,
but they are not entirely wrong, either.
A class arrogance is palpable in the way
Northerners attempted to watch the Battle at Bull Run
with picnics of champagne, for example.

This is a crime story in a large and violent place.
Too large for subject and object.

I keep thinking of the sundry peoples
infected by contagion and displaced from their lands
by the Puritan settlers and their freedom fevers.
It is no real wonder why the Narragansett,
Wampanoag, and Nipmuc went after
Mary Rowlandson’s colony and subsequently
stole her and her children during
an early morning raid on Lancaster.
What, perhaps, is surprising is the way
her captors shared particularly tender bits of deer meat
and left her unmolested under their watch;
something she found so remarkable that 
she detailed it in her wildly popular captivity narrative.
And yet the Natives were called “savage.”

This is a crime story in a large and violent place.
Too large for subject and object.

In the official grammar of this nation
One performs the action
& the Other receives it
but
heavy water ancestors
breathe beneath this
ship hull of injury
pull us into new life with them

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