Ode to Louis Calvin Samuels  

My daddy is … dying
a slow death
a slow death
of spirit … of spirit
of body
of mind … of mind

And I, the
his forever little grrl
bear witness to …
the

Falstaffian demise
of
this
now …
familiar … stranger.

He sits in muted …
paleness
of what he once was.

A nonexistent hand …
of his GREAT power
OVER me.

I relive with him … wrinkled memories …
from his childhood
that safe-unsafe haven
he goes back to …
crouching in gray recess …
from the monster … of
dementia.

He speaks with vivid recall of a riverbank …
HIS grandmother’s mother …
dressed neat but severely in the daily uniform - a long cotton functional skirt, dark in color … the garb of a sharecropper … swishing against long grasses … warning him of hidden poisonous snakes … as they fished … seemingly without care (for once) … for the days meal.
“Louis (or LC as they called him) watch out for dem snakes” … he says now … affectionately … over 70 years later.

He reminds me that food on the farm was stored underground.
Enough food for everyone … laid in earthen storage pits.
Fat watermelons … potatoes … smoked meats …
NO ONE … was lacking

He talks as if it … as if it were this morning … of my great-great Grandmother, an ill-tempered woman, cooking relentlessly for the sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, cousins, uncles and aunts living in compressed communal …
unexpressed love …
love expressed

Louis speaks of walking to the one room schoolhouse (the largest boy in his “class”) on dusty, unpaved paths albeit roads …
the yellow bus jiggling with white kids, rode by, offering entrails of dust and dirt, and cruel tauntings of precious. white. children. … spit from bus windows.

Even more lethal … white boys/men in pick-up trucks-DRIVE-BY shooters, firing with impunity … to shoot them dead … with no remorse.
As if firing upon a deadly animal.

He speaks of serpentine lines of sun darkened Black farmers: sweat drenched men and boys … wearing worn/laborious dusty glazed overalls and brogans … Sunday’s best …
(forming a continuous line)
in the hot Georgia sun … none complaining … watching for the white boys …
just maintaining … just … hoping.
SOME …
without shoes waiting to enlist in the white United States military for a country that offered them no respect … no protection … no true citizenship … nor the simple dignity of being … human.

Yet to escape the venamous, heinous and legal Jim Crow South …
a foreign bullet or death on foreign soil was respectfully preferable to a lynching or the relentless assaults to demean spirit and humanity.

Louis … like my grandmothers and others in the Black community chanted the mantra of: “The white man will not let you do that.”
I thought it was the rantings of a different generation ‘plantation talk.‘ come
People that could not adapt to ‘our’ modern times.
I was wrong.

More and more I understand.

I now understand … at the age of 60 as in 60 years of age.
I understand with a Black President sitting in the white house with his wife and two children.

I now understand …
that this America is birthed and rooted in the currency of slavery and it’s forever stained aftermath.

I now understand …
that white male privilege, albeit white supremacy is the DNA of these United States of America.

I now understand …
that the pursuit of capitalism disguised as individualism … over community … over human-man-ness is the catalyst of genocide of our Black community …
and that of these states of America

I now understand …
that some white men … are soul-less.

I now understand …
WE … Blacks … are the CHOSEN vanguards of the universe …
that means … that some whites are not
and …
they know it.

I-now-understand …
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