Audio: Read by the author.
Montgomery, Alabama
o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new…
—John Donne
General Duckett
Adam King
Benjamin Jones
Edwin Goodwin
Joseph Jones
Joseph King
Moses Jones…
She reads their names aloud,
men, beloved to some,
lynched in Little River County,
Arkansas, each appellation
engraved on a six-foot
steel slab
hanging from the rafters
by a black pole,
tall tombstones
accruing a layer
of patina, resisting
what corrosion
weather always brings.
Her voice quivers
in the wet wind
gusting through the southern
spiral of counties from Texas
& Mississippi, Florida
& Alabama, Georgia
& Kentucky, wending
through every body’s
Gothic horror.
I follow the floor
descending while
the monuments rise
above my head,
my eyes straining
to see one
proclaiming,
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown.
I hear her chant
more names,
women’s, children’s.
When an EJI employee
draped in nylon poncho
asks, Are you okay?
the words that waft
my way break, blow,
& burn me:
I’m saying the names,
all of them.
O, how my ancestors,
like Achan of old,
were unfaithful,
stealing, like those
precious metals &
that irresistible
robe, those
God was devoted to,
those who bore
not Cain’s mark
but the autograph
of the Almighty.
How I want to rend
my clothes like Joshua,
drop to my knees,
then
lie prostrate
before every single
marker & beg
for forgiveness.
I bow my head,
wipe my eyes,
cup my cheeks.
I am so fickle,
I realize here, I who
eschew the Old
Testament’s wrathful
God who ordered
the slaughter of those
I’d call innocent,
I who interrogate him
now, demanding
to know why
he didn’t show up,
drown in his tears
every white woman & child,
every man who cheered
like football fans
at these lynchings.
The same employee
now checks on me.
I simply make
eye contact,
nod my head.
How to say
it feels as though hope,
long withheld
& heavy as gold,
hurtles through
the atmosphere,
lands on my head
like no ordinary
conviction.
God commanded
Joshua, Stand up!
What are you doing
on your face? So I
move along
the boardwalk
of broken necks,
the man in Ohio
lynched for hanging
around a white
neighborhood,
the woman
lynched for daring
to complain
about her husband’s
lynching, the legion
of lynchings in the Tulsa
massacre of 1921…
It seems to go
too far—
north,
east & west,
our history terrifying
as any fascist
purge: misspoken
word, wrong-way
walk, sideways
glance, all reasons
for the rope,
& the double,
even triple deaths—
the tar, the knives,
the bullets, those
unquenchable
flames—as if Black
bones required
brute force, their flesh,
fierce fortitude,
their souls, no mercy.
I don’t want
to be a fragile, white
woman, but I am.
I know that now.
I am undone
by one woman’s
recitations.
Water spills
over the back wall,
dissolving the distance
between heaven
& earth. Another cloud
like the hand of God
passes over.
for Ariel Sabrina Ferguson Lee
Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Full Worm Moon (Cascade), which received a Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award as well as honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year Award.