On the banks of Fort Monroe
Runaways gathered rocks
To sink their boats
To strand themselves.
To the chagrin of Confederate slavers
And the halting awe of Union soldiers,
Black men claimed themselves on the spot
Where the coast met the first enslaved.
Shoeless feet now bestride the worlds
From chattel slavery to nascent freedom;
This roadstead forever hosts the currents.
But the land had lines on it they couldn’t see.
If a war waged in Virginia
The costs echoed in the hollers
Rippled in the waterways
In a boll of cotton, in a cup of tea –
Where metal boats float – and leagues away
A railroad of bones lies broken
At the bottom of the Atlantic.
They faced the same choices
The same as past centuries.
If they moved their feet
Risking everything for everything
They could change their histories
Change the way the sun warmed their skin
Marry those who warmed their skin.
Contraband now because they ran
Caught now between what’s claimed
And what’s surrendered in tidewater
Or on the battlefield, once a farmfield.
Not enslaved but not free from scenes of subjection
Between the proclamation and the shadow,
Ink dries on the sable backs of women:
New words amended from saltwater and gunpowder
For the country’s second revolution.
If ever the specters of hope and freedom
Lived to see the auction block erode,
They also had to reckon how
The ledger engraved lines they couldn’t see
Until they witnessed the pendulum gaveled
Onto school desks buoyed by exceptional elision.
But even if the word is buried in ash heaps
Or stowed under the bay’s deep current,
They will still sing about it,
The specters of hope and freedom.
