Forty Acres and A Mule

How would it feel
To be chained,
To be confined to the point that
You could regurgitate at the scent
Of your own flesh?
To be taken from your home,
To new land that is unknown,
To a language that is unlearned?
Can you imagine it?

How would it feel
To be oppressed,
To have someone controlling
Your very existence?
To work from dawn until dusk,
To have your fingers butchered
From being forced to pick the cotton fields?
To be a grown man, grown woman
And be beaten in front of your peers,
Your oppressors, your spouse, and your children
And able to do nothing to stop it?
I want you to picture it

How would it feel
To have a man violate you in the night
And disown you in the day,
Impregnate you with a child of mixed race
That he will never acknowledge as his own,
Never let your bastard child live
As blood of his blood in that big home?
Can you see it?

How would it feel
To long for a freedom
That is rightfully yours,
To be amputated for trying to claim that freedom
To have your flesh and blood
Born of you
Ripped from your arms and
To have your spouse taken from your bed
And to have him auctioned and sold
To the highest bidder like a prize thoroughbred?
To be deprived of the knowledge
Confined in a book
Or to lose a limb
For trying to obtain that knowledge
Or the use of a pen and paper
Can you feel it?

How would it feel
To finally be free
But to then realize that it’s only a false freedom
(Physically free to leave your imprisonment,
but continuing to be mentally enslaved)
Because you pay your fare at the front
But you end up in the back
And you have ghosts inflaming
Crosses at the front of your home
And Jim Crow’s in town for a while
So you have to be hospitable
And use separate bathrooms to
Seclude you from your
Fellow human beings that just
Happen to be of another color, of a different race
And you have to go through the back door
Never able to make eye contact
Always having to hide your face?
To be called COON, MONKEY, NIGGER!
And still being enslaved in a sense feel that
You must accept this treatment as life
And as law?
To watch your house burning up in flames
Or to be taken from your home by men in white sheets
And have a noose adorning your neck
And hung, feet dangling from a tree
Like a Christmas ornament until the
Very breath of life
Abandons your body?
Do you like it?

How would it feel
To finally have a change take place
To be able to drink from the forbidden fountains
To use that bathroom
And then discover that AGAIN
These gestures of equality
Are symbolic of false equality?
You are educated but can’t find work
Or you have a career that allows you
To be able to afford a beautiful home
Only to be chased out by the more
Subtle white supremacists
And then your labeled,
Stereotyped as a CRIMINAL
DRUG PUSHER
Women clutch their purses upon
Sight of you
Or transfer to the other side of the street
Labeled guilty for a crime
You didn’t commit
Because of the stereotype that
Persons of your ethnic background
Are prone to do those things?
(Besides they think you all look alike anyway)
I ask you can you accept it?

Well we’ve experienced this all
We’ve been enslaved and oppressed
Degraded and mistreated
Murdered and raped
We’ve endured the false freedom
The false equality
The false acceptance
And the false promises……….

Because dammit! I’m still waiting for my forty and a mule!