What i remember

is green

in the trees

and the leaves

and the smell of mango

and yams

and if i had a drum

i would send to the brothers

--Be care full of the ocean--

-Lucille Clifton, “Jonah”

we will wear

new bones again.

………………

we be splendid in new bones.

other people think they know

how long life is

how strong life is.

we know.

-Lucille Clifton, “New Bones”

Perhaps you have been grabbed by two white men when your family sent you on an errand to fetch water. The bucket is either empty, as you were just approaching the well. They were waiting there for you. Or maybe it’s full, and falling from your head, but you are busy trying to extricate yourself from men you have never laid eyes on before. Maybe one has a gun. Maybe both. You, on the other hand, strong, but young, caught off guard, only have your scream. But it’s of no use. Your father, brothers, mother - no one hears you.

You hear someone else scream. Then others scream too. You hear the scuffling, the attempts to escape. And still fighting harder to free yourself, to your ears comes the sound of something foreign from the mouths of those who have grabbed you and those you hear screaming. You hear the leaves rustle, bodies dragged along, those strange sounds and the screams coming closer. Mothers, girls, fathers.

The foreign voices are angry. But the foreign voices are in control. You can’t see anymore as something has been tossed over your head. You are part of one group surrounded by the hands and the voices. No one from your village, or your family, is escaping the strange voices.

Feet and hands bound in chains, in the darkness, you recall that you have never seen an animal chained. You are kicked, beaten, and punched. Who has ever done that to you!

Who are these people who have you walking miles in such an undignified manner? Who has determined that you are less than the animals you have cared for? That you are to be their property? You are to be an object to be sold at market!

There’s a big house surrounded by fields of tobacco or cotton. People like you are toiling away under the sun in those fields.

You will be here forever and ever. And year after year, you will remain “girl.” As “girl,” you will become the master’s plaything, the mistress’s punching bag, resented because you obey the master.

And you will think it’s one big joke and try to laugh, only you’ll cry as you remember your family, how you learned to cook jollof. Or prepare the kola-nuts. Ran for the water. You’ll remember that day. You’ll lay your head down to sleep and return to Mother Africa.

You won’t know this, but generations later, when your descendants are finally freed from toiling on the plantations that a war, when many have died trying to escape enslavement and risking their lives, returned to free others, when the war took many more of their lives, your descendants will be killed outright because white Americans, angry and feeling betrayed by the abolitionists, by Lincoln and Grant, will refuse to accept Black people as neighbors, friends, co-workers, doctors, teachers. Humans!

White America will free itself from the violence of enslaving other human beings by telling itself that America is exceptional, America is great. There’s a Manifest Destiny with “America” already stamped on bayonets used by Cavalry to clear the Frontier, on the side of boxes of ammunition shipped off to the Philippines, on the wings of bombers and jets and drones to come.

But for now, the neighbors of your descendants will amass guns, rifles, gasoline, dynamite. More public opinion and consensus. More narratives about the free and the brave to represent what becomes, for decades to follow, “US History.”

And soon the terrorism will begin in earnest. Determined and purposeful. Systematic terrorism!

Until, one day, laws and policies permit your descendants to be ghettoized in the north and segregated in the south. Custom refuses to make exceptions. Tradition means stepping aside or crossing the street, sitting in the back of the bus. Drink from the fountain labeled “colored.” Expect poor housing and no admission to white hospitals or certain white institutions of high education. No fair jury because all white.

Your descendants haven’t disappointed you. So many have had their blood spilled on “the picnic” grounds where their bodies hung from trees. So many girl children bleed in backwoods and so much blood from Black bodies colored the Mississippi River red. And yet, when doors were closed to African Americans, they opened them. Speaking truth at the risk of death - they did! Many of them did. And African Americans have sung the blues, put our hearts and minds into intricate Jazz riffs - and where is American culture without Black creativity? Because through it all, from nothing, African Americans have created life.

But it has never been enough for contrarians, for those who love violence, death and destruction. Profits. Above all life, profits. So many white Americans still live in dread of that “someone day,” one day, when your descendants will rise up as they once did in Haiti and then… then… White America can’t imagine anything good coming from the uprising of the hated and feared.

Jefferson believed a free Black to be a preposterous idea. His descendants, the kidnappers, slave merchants, slaveholders, policymakers, sheriffs, bounty hunters, tenant farmers and current adherents to white supremacy, image an American nightmare if forced to think of African Americans as truly liberated people. Truly liberated from the narrative and subsequent laws and policies built by a nation that, even in its sleep, defends white supremacy.

So the bombs blasting homes and churches set your descendants back, along with “law and order” thinking and electoral college stealing. Official and unofficial judge, jury, and executioner.

Generations after generations, white Americans have taught their children at the dinner table, at formal educational sites, at the broadcast and television stations, in the advertising suites of Wall Street to despise all of your descendants. All of your descendants!

How is your sleep peaceful?

Those with a history of being captured and held for days and weeks in dark caves waiting to be shipped like sardines to these shores, those with this history are still fighting for liberation.

L-i-b-e-r-a-t-i-o-n!

Many of us have idea of freedom - an idea so very different from the freedom white America brags it has already in its possession.

Our nation is divided, has long been divided – this, many of us know.

On August 24, 2020, Rusten Sheskey, a Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer, fired his weapon on Jacob Blake. The 29-year-old Blake, an unarmed African American, was shot seven times in the back at close range while his three of his six children sat in the back of his car. Sheskey is on administrative leave and has yet to be charged for seriously injuring another human being. Blake, speaking from his hospital bed last week, is paralyzed from the waist down. He’s captured in an all-too-familiar moment: when state violence encounters a Black American.

Last weekend, I spoke with a Black Lives Matter organizer and activist from Milwaukee. The person I interviewed for commentary chose not to be identified because of a fear of retribution. Therefore, they are being named BLM. In turn, BLM’s account of what happened here in Kenosha is from the perspective of someone who was present at the protests. In addition, BLM wants to make clear that while the work of the Milwaukee activists isn’t exactly that of the “plans and goals” of the national/international organization, the activists and organizers of BLM Milwaukee are committed to the idea that Black lives matter and, therefore, to the movement to fight for social justice against enslavement of any form. Liberation!

To bear witness to the shooting of Jacob Blake and the response of state violence against the Black and ally protesters, BLM Milwaukee activists arrived in Kenosha two hours after the shooting.

From the first night of protests, when the number of activists swelled until there was a large presence of citizens demanding justice for Blake, the arrest of Sheskey , the resignation of the police chief and sheriff, the gathering was peaceful. Most protesters were BLM organizers and activists, BLM supporters, and community organizers. Black and white. Kenosha, Milwaukee, Chicago. Until the second night, when the atmosphere was changed and the agenda was disrupted. The BLM protesters and their supporters were infiltrated by “Caucasian individuals in all black, breaking windows,” and had their narrative of liberation and justice co-opted, again. Listen carefully - the subject swapped for object sound like this: BLM and supporters are “looters,” destroyers of property!

BLM, observing the scene in the Kenosha downtown area, spoke to me of “how quickly those buildings went up in flames. They went up in flames pretty quickly.”

It’s no wonder that on the third night, the number of protesters was less than the previous night. “Some screamed at police,” but otherwise, it was peaceful in contrast to the “military equipment police drove through the crowd.”

At one point, BLM Milwaukee activists witnessed the police driving protesters toward the gathering individuals dressed all in black, “some throwing bricks.” Yet, the police focused in on the protesters and the press. Using tear gas, these protesters and press personnel were driven in the direction of the white militia. “Things became volatile then.” The protesters were pushed away by the time the self-proclaimed defender of property, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, fired the first shot.

Something about Rittenhouse, in military gear, carting and firing the long rifle, made him visible to protesters but, unfortunately not to the officers in their military gear. Rittenhouse murders two people and injures another!

And then he flees the scene, returning to his home in Antioch, Illinois. With his mother! There, Rittenhouse calls himself in. Surrenders. No shots are fired at him! The current occupant of the White House is on the record defending Rittenhouse as a young man, in turn, trying to defend law and order and property and himself, ultimately, from unruly BLM protesters. Never mind that now we have video and eyewitness accounts from unarmed protesters attempting to disarm Rittenhouse!

Black liberation is a constant struggle.

BLM Milwaukee is committed to working in four areas toward that goal of liberation: The organizers and activists want to produce stories highlighting systemic racism, to produce studies on the effects of systemic racism, to organize support for the re-structuring of the department of justice, and to draft economic policies to combat poverty in the Milwaukee area.

But by no means is organizing strictly for the benefit of Milwaukee’s Black population. Overall, “BLM Milwaukee’s work is an extension of years of liberation work,” and, therefore, the Milwaukee organizers will be working closely with organizers and activists from Kenosha and other towns and cities in Wisconsin.

One of the questions we ask ourselves is “what does it mean to be a Black person in Milwaukee?”

You start at home and work your way out.

We owe this fight to those ancestors who were captured, tortured, looted, lynched, terrorized, and exploited.

And, if anything, the shooting of Jacob Blake and the subsequent narrative of violence, attempting to dampen the protests for freedom, should be a wake-up call for Middle America. For a world is also organizing around the idea that Black lives matter.