the big payback
When the brother
who looked like Pokey Bear
walked up
to my car
somewhere off Wheeler Ave,
where paradise and a Karankawan Kwan
whose enslaved name would have been Mateo
were paved over to make a parking lot,
he waved at me from behind my side-view mirror
with fingernails aged finer
than sugarcane spirits & dirt in his beard
from when he & I were first sold into hell
at the Port of Galveston
in 1832.
The brother clasped his urine-lathered
fingers like Mary Magdalene
at the feet of Christ’s suffering,
with little more on his back
than if he too had been disrobed for
crucifixion.
I knew I had only two very ugly dollar bills
in my console—
one for my daughter and one for me.
So, we proceed to pay the man.
With both my dirty dollars,
we pay the man.
I answer his prayer hands
with a Black Power fist
as a reminder of what he told me back
when we was bein’ rode
by the merchants & pirates—
now tax men & police—
back when we was lower than Cuban Bloodhounds
who chewed on the livers of Drapetomaniacs
at the foot of some First Ladies dining table.
He told me how we get over,
and that’s at a red light
on a Tuesday
in Houston,
where, when the brother asks for a dollar
you be sure to give him two,
because the white man took four
and we still gotta eat
to win this war.
Mrs. Tubman’s toes
—for Harriet Tubman and Nelson Davis — Harriet’s second husband
He figured they’d be heavier, given
how folks talk about ’em.
Heavy like hammers and guillotines.
Heavy like that $12,000 bounty on her head.
He figured they’d be heavier.
But dainty was they.
As was she,
in every part small enough to hide
behind a White Oak when slave patrollers
got to stumbling drunk through snow-covered thickets
to snare her odor.
Dainty was she, with pistols and desert roses
in the dune mosques of the Sahel that foretold her safeness.
Them white boys never could catch her trail.
Though the cold takes its toll
on them dainty thangs.
Ten toes with hangnails, grown and grieving.
Them bunions grew hard.
He figured her feet would be heavier,
running his thumb through
blisters and heartache.
He ain’t never know if she was cryin’
because of the
Good Lawd pain of being captured
by a man the right way —
with a kiss
how she asked —
or if it was the children she had to leave at the border.
Was it the women who left their mothers to die in the woods?
Was it the lovers who left their someones to fend off the phantom limb
of a goodbye fuck, knowing everything gonna be sold by mornin’?
She cried something past due and paid for
as he rubbed her feet,
like making sun dried bricks of red clay.
Somebody gotta love this warrior woman like fruit
in Renaissance nudes.Why are only white women bestowed the soft flush flesh
of D’Anjou pear skin
for just bearing white children?
How many babes did this woman return to water?
A General, sewn together safe like Bible binding, and hard like scripture.
She something good like God when she show up.
But certainly misbegotten like the son of the Holy Father if she leave
before you could outrun the hounds.
But in his hands
she was the little woman he loved big enough
to cup in birth between his wide palms.
Toe by toe.
Fugitive by fugitive.
Kiss by kiss in the canyons of her nail beds
where the fungi ain’t turned to feast.
He ain’t say nothing,
like she ain’t say nothing to the little girls whose fathers were able
to get them to Moses’s cradle but couldn’t make it the rest of the way to Mount Sinai.
From heel to arch, she carried that weight.
And he kneaded through every pound of pressure below her ankles.
Bunyon to bayou.
Corn to Calgary.
He figured her feet would be heavier, till he saw her coal-shine skin
bleed gold at daybreak, supple,
like the supper she fed him and his men at her kitchen sink
next to Heaven.
Next to how he laid on her breast at the dinner table
the first time.
Some say prayer altar.
He just say, woman,
though the papers printed her name every Saint but Siena.
But he say she get to be a woman today.
So he kept rubbing on them feet, through her good moans and God-fearin’
clairvoyant coos.
He kept rubbing on Mrs. Tubman’s toes till
wasn’t no Saints left to judge what happened
when she asked him to move them fingers up her softer,
and far more hiding thighs.
