I grew up in a middle class family in a middle class neighborhood, and went to a middle-class to upper middle-class grade school and high school. The term “diversity” didn’t apply to my life - it was pretty much white, middle class, and christian.

The dark side of this experience was the casual racism that everyone just took for granted. This wasn’t just the way the kids acted - it was the parents as well. Jokes about slavery were commonplace, as were disparaging comments. I regular refrain was “well, you know how those people are”. We were cautioned about going into areas that were “too black”.

It wasn’t until I started working that I become more aware of the diversity of our society. When I was 17, I had a friend who was African-American. Tyrone was a good person, a hard worker, and a great friend. Who happened to be black.

One moment in particular sticks in my mind when I think about Tyrone; I had written an essay for school in which I noted that I have black friends who are just as important to me as white friends, and that to me there was no difference. I remember my father dismissing this and ridiculing me for that line.

I’ve tried as hard as I know how to stamp out the “casual racism” as much as I can. I try and speak up when friends or family act this way. I know that I’m not always successful, but I like to try.

For today’s Poetry Monday I want to offer a piece by Robert Hayden, a piece I first read back in high school. Read this poem, or better yet, listen to it being read by Robert Hayden. You can feel the pain and anguish in his words; if everyone could experience 1/100th of that perhaps we could help cut down on the cancer that is racism.

Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:

   Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,   
   sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;     
   horror the corposant and compass rose.   

Middle Passage:
voyage through death
to life upon these shores.

   “10 April 1800—   
   Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says     
   their moaning is a prayer for death,   
   ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.     
   Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter     
   to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.”   

Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann:

   Standing to America, bringing home     
   black gold, black ivory, black seed.   

           Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,     
           of his bones New England pews are made,     
           those are altar lights that were his eyes.  

Jesus Saviour Pilot Me
Over Life’s Tempestuous Sea

We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord,
safe passage to our vessels bringing
heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

Jesus Saviour

   “8 bells. I cannot sleep, for I am sick   
   with fear, but writing eases fear a little   
   since still my eyes can see these words take shape     
   upon the page & so I write, as one   
   would turn to exorcism. 4 days scudding,   
   but now the sea is calm again. Misfortune   
   follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning     
   tutelary gods). Which one of us   
   has killed an albatross? A plague among   
   our blacks—Ophthalmia: blindness—& we     
   have jettisoned the blind to no avail.   
   It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads.   
   Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.'s eyes     
   & there is blindness in the fo’c’sle   
   & we must sail 3 weeks before we come   
   to port.”   

           What port awaits us, Davy Jones’   
           or home? I’ve heard of slavers drifting, drifting,     
           playthings of wind and storm and chance, their crews     
           gone blind, the jungle hatred   
           crawling up on deck.  

Thou Who Walked On Galilee

   “Deponent further sayeth The Bella J   
   left the Guinea Coast   
   with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd     
   for the barracoons of Florida:   

   “That there was hardly room ’tween-decks for half     
   the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;     
   that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh     
   and sucked the blood:   

   “That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest     
   of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins;     
   that there was one they called The Guinea Rose     
   and they cast lots and fought to lie with her:   

   “That when the Bo’s’n piped all hands, the flames     
   spreading from starboard already were beyond     
   control, the negroes howling and their chains     
   entangled with the flames:   

   “That the burning blacks could not be reached,     
   that the Crew abandoned ship,   
   leaving their shrieking negresses behind,   
   that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:   

   “Further Deponent sayeth not.”   

Pilot Oh Pilot Me

   II  

Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,
Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;
have watched the artful mongos baiting traps
of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.
Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity
and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,
Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

And there was one—King Anthracite we named him—
fetish face beneath French parasols
of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth
whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:

He’d honor us with drum and feast and conjo
and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love,
and for tin crowns that shone with paste,
red calico and German-silver trinkets

Would have the drums talk war and send
his warriors to burn the sleeping villages
and kill the sick and old and lead the young
in coffles to our factories.

Twenty years a trader, twenty years,
for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested
from those black fields, and I’d be trading still
but for the fevers melting down my bones.

   III  

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move,
their bright ironical names
like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth;
plough through thrashing glister toward
fata morgana’s lucent melting shore,
weave toward New World littorals that are
mirage and myth and actual shore.

Voyage through death,
voyage whose chartings are unlove.

A charnel stench, effluvium of living death
spreads outward from the hold,
where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

   Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,     
   the corpse of mercy rots with him,     
   rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes.   

   But, oh, the living look at you   
   with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,     
   whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark     
   to strike you like a leper’s claw.   

   You cannot stare that hatred down   
   or chain the fear that stalks the watches   
   and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;     
   cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,     
   the timeless will.  

           “But for the storm that flung up barriers     
           of wind and wave, The Amistad, señores,   
           would have reached the port of Príncipe in two,     
           three days at most; but for the storm we should     
           have been prepared for what befell.     
           Swift as the puma’s leap it came. There was     
           that interval of moonless calm filled only     
           with the water’s and the rigging’s usual sounds,     
           then sudden movement, blows and snarling cries     
           and they had fallen on us with machete     
           and marlinspike. It was as though the very     
           air, the night itself were striking us.     
           Exhausted by the rigors of the storm,   
           we were no match for them. Our men went down     
           before the murderous Africans. Our loyal     
           Celestino ran from below with gun     
           and lantern and I saw, before the cane-   
           knife’s wounding flash, Cinquez,   
           that surly brute who calls himself a prince,     
           directing, urging on the ghastly work.   
           He hacked the poor mulatto down, and then     
           he turned on me. The decks were slippery   
           when daylight finally came. It sickens me     
           to think of what I saw, of how these apes     
           threw overboard the butchered bodies of   
           our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.     
           Enough, enough. The rest is quickly told:     
           Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us     
           you see to steer the ship to Africa,     
           and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea     
           voyaged east by day and west by night,     
           deceiving them, hoping for rescue,     
           prisoners on our own vessel, till     
           at length we drifted to the shores of this     
           your land, America, where we were freed     
           from our unspeakable misery. Now we     
           demand, good sirs, the extradition of     
           Cinquez and his accomplices to La     
           Havana. And it distresses us to know     
           there are so many here who seem inclined     
           to justify the mutiny of these blacks.     
           We find it paradoxical indeed   
           that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty     
           are rooted in the labor of your slaves   
           should suffer the august John Quincy Adams     
           to speak with so much passion of the right     
           of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters     
           and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero’s     
           garland for Cinquez. I tell you that     
           we are determined to return to Cuba   
           with our slaves and there see justice done. Cinquez—   
           or let us say ‘the Prince’—Cinquez shall die.”   

   The deep immortal human wish,     
   the timeless will:   

           Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,     
           life that transfigures many lives.   

   Voyage through death   
                                 to life upon these shores.