I am an old woman made of deposited salt
My bloodline runs authentically hot
I hail from perpetual sunrise
Where battle is real and peace treaties are lies
Spent decades on my feet and kept my house clean
Raised chickens and children under rule of British Queen
Voyaged across the Atlantic through treacherous middle passage reef
Found rocky shores of New Scotland, Tancook cabbage, and bully beef
Built a home away from home using scraps of knotted lumber
Felled trees of hard knocks and hard won my short slumber
A product of survival and scarcity
Grandmother of plenty rude pickney
Like dis pretty likkle one here, just turn 23, Say she goes to uni-ver-sity
Schooled in critical feminism & fancy race theory
I was never taught to be critical of my history
Had no time to figure out philosophy, found maths a bit too ‘calculacy
So I took a slow minute to count one to ‘tree
Summed up my children on hands and knee
While she waxes her big people degree, tongue wagging ‘bout colonial austerity
Says my folklore Fante faith is a practice of fu-ti-lity
That my cataract vision lacks clarity
But I can still clearly see and feel the scars of hypocrisy
My Ashanti people pioneered absent terrains of de-territory
Withstood no vacancies and no jobs here sorry
The mystery of my history she breaks down for me
The metalanguage of race she translates haughtily for equality
Granny she says with strong chin
interpreting for me Code Noir of French and British imperialism
She gestures cut eye and kiss teeth how us Caribbean folk behave:
Old woman you are so much more now than a glorified nurse maid
You were recruited for academic merit and skilled employability
Visas are no longer denied based on race and nationality.
One thing I do know from the years of looking back
If I ever fixed my mouth to talk to grown woman like ‘dat
my mouth and ‘ma tail would have get slap
I would have felt the rod on my seat of my education
What ‘dis girl know ‘bout involuntary disciplinary participation?
I tell her: no matter how biggity you feel in that self-labeled identity
Or turn up your wide nose to capitalist prosperity
how hard you kick the gift horse of liberty
Sweet girl I’ll still give you one lesson for free
One you can take very personally
Ole Granny can still bend you over her knee
Look chile there in the dark hollow of yonder tree
the ship gallow where they stacked and chained whole villages quite legally
Little Black Sambos for the new community
refused us education spare needlework and carpentry
See there where that resilient little Birch tree bends
And the pristine whiteness that lies where the treetop descends
The trail of broken canoes in the shallow pockets of promised land
The broken spirits on soil that cyaan grow banana and yam
Where at the promised treetop is the place for we?
From the frozen North we will never pick mango or sweet dilly
This short summer can never warm to Linton’s dub poetry
Shaded by the cursed penmanship of dead poet society
You and all your education
Come from the humanities of feeder school segregation
The backs of many Jamaicans laboured and toiled that great hill
For your high and mighty city view from the Citadel
Sweet girl you can’t hypothesize centuries of genocide
Millions enslaved and severed from land and family ties
Gold Coast of golden plantain plundered for plantation crops
Tribal nations reduced to concubines and sweatshops
Our history isn’t something you can feel from a newly written book
Cuz you don’t know the real story until all your facts gets took
You think I’m subservient because I’m so neat and quiet
What you know about the necessity of riot?
18th century Nova Scotia kept thousands residentially and mentally enslaved
Parliament sowed sloppy seeds wherever it forcefully laid
You’re the light skinned reminders insidious attention paid
Book of Negroes and church obits the only clue to how most of us were made
And even those can’t be fully trusted
Language preserved in code to allude Colonel Mustard
We didn’t have material resources
Faith and education were not at all easy choices
But if we learned anything from 140 years of Trelawney Maroon strategy
Even more than the hard lesson of coerced policy
It’s that we were free before the bondage of subsidy
Daughters of mountaineers and Dahomey warrior brides
Revolts of British colony and evangelical Baptist scribes
“Come-from away” culture passed on through artistic oral history
Social work and scientific achievements are buried in mystery
So before you try to wrinkle my starched Sunday wear
Just know I ironed my burdens with care
Laid them down with righteous song and tearful prayer
Weaved my worries into baskets from scraps of birch tree
Carried life and love for all of you pickney
Now you come with plaited weave to tell me ‘bout my history
But what do I know? I’m just an old woman of deposited salt
Whose bloodline runs authentically hot
Hail from the lifted head to the perpetual sunrise
Where the battle is real and peace treaties are lies
Incredible. Painful. True. Thank you.
Thank you
Great write and read. Painful tell of rememberence from which we came.
The road our ancestors took was brutal.
Thank you for this piece.
Peace.