Two Poems: Cortney Lamar Charleston
It’s Important I Remember That Sojourner
Truth Hadn’t Suffered Enough—
apparently being born the lowest class of noun wasn’t adequately tragic.
Steering one’s life story over the hills of low Dutch and English was too elevated an exercise for an illiterate.
Her Northern narrative of enslavement could weaken the moral authority of the abolitionist cause, so it needed to be revised southward with diction and cadence.
Birthing five babies, one of whom was of her legal captor rather than her beloved, was eight labors too few to evoke sufficient sympathy.
The hard labor: perfect. The beatings: even better for being even worse.
Four bills of sale on her back were forced moves that could help propel two movements forward.
She could escape the institution of inherited servitude; she could best a white man in court to reclaim her stolen son;
she could find strength through Jesus Christ and toll the church bell at the back of her throat;
she could name herself anew and travel the country preaching— but couldn’t be allowed an authentic portrait in print.
Ain’t I a woman? is a question Truth never asked and never would. I am a woman’s rights is right factually; is right spiritually; is a statement with a single interpretation that left no room for Frances Dana Barker Gage’s editorial intent to wash for whiteness—with the blackness of ink— Sojourner’s unshakeable voice: the substance being sold to support the shadow.
It’s
Important I Remember That the Enemy of My Enemy Is Someone I Don’t Know
Very Well—
not enough to confirm if our minds meet congruently in their moral convictions,
circles drawn on the calendar in red to mark the days of action we agreed to without uttering a word.
Rings around every square representing a unit of time— Rome wasn’t built in a day and didn’t fall in one either, even if it should’ve.
Worthy accomplices see the forest and the trees and the bodies hanging from their phantom limbs.
They know that we must liberate everyone everywhere all at once. Just this afternoon,
I told the animal rights advocate who solicited me for coin— as police hurried a houseless person into invisibility across the street— that a deficit of attention is a condition needing treatment, and they didn’t understand where my attitude was coming from because they approached me for having a kind face, like a perfectly round balloon tied to the end of a stick.
If an unkindness is an assemblage of ravens, a kindness would be one million faces like my own, and there is only one of me. There is only one of you.
CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON 77
And yet, we are hated by the same— and yet, we are hated all the same,
though we are not the same in the shape of our thinking, or in our crimes against solidarity.
I can’t call you friend while you withhold your forgiveness. You can’t call me friend while not extending an apology.
But my enemy, who is your enemy, bitterly, calls you dead and me, buried, without even a stone gummed in the dirt like a tooth to identify me.