Lift Every Voice and Sing...
The Wall Street financial district in New York City, also known as the financial capital of the world, is built upon a burial ground for African slaves and their descendants. The actual Wall Street was originally a wall built by European settlers and their African slaves in the early 1600s to protect settlements from indigenous people, who at times joined revolting slaves in struggles for freedom. On January 1, 1804, during a time when sugar was as important to the world economy as petroleum is today, revolting slaves who had risen up from bondage on the world’s richest sugar plantations made Haiti the first truly free nation in the modern world. They also returned the name of the new nation to Ayiti (land of high mountains), which is what the entire island was called by its inhabitants before Columbus “discovered” and renamed the people and their homeland three hundred years earlier. Within a couple of decades after Ayiti’s liberation, however, the young republic was forced to mortgage its freedom to powerful banks to reimburse slaveholders for the loss of their human property. To protect the interests of these banks from “civil unrest,” the U.S. sent troops to occupy Ayiti for two decades (1915-34) and still intervenes in the governance of Ayiti’s impoverished people. So, the image of Occupy protesters gathering around Wall Street at the beginning of this holiday season reminded me of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice,” which was written in 1900 and later came to be known as the “Negro National Anthem.”
… ‘til earth and heaven ring…
My ancestors were buried under Wall Street
And are about to rise up singing.
Autumnal equinox foreshadows
Short, dark days of yellow, red
And warm brown into black earth tones,
Spirituals, wind chimes, falling leaves
From deciduous tropical family trees
Landing in America, looking for my soil to feed.
So I run and rescue them from asphalt and the
Concrete buzz of leaf-blower-engine whine.
Then I ask ancestral saints to bless
November Days of Dead, to feed
My weary soul, anoint my dreadlocked head.
…Ring with the harmonies…
My ancestors were buried under Wall Street
And are about to rise up singing.
My Harvest Feast gives thanks
For Boukman Dutty, Toussaint L’Ouverture,
And Capois-la-Mort’s November battle that
Won the freedom war. Yet Ayiti still struggles,
Through many generations, liberating me
From shame of nations built on slavery.
My winter solstice Christmas, too,
Receives God’s freedom shining forth, anew
With each New Year, I joyfully hear
My own holy mother, child and family decree:
Know that we are people, no longer property.
…Of liberty…
My ancestors were buried under Wall Street
And are about to rise up singing
But winter’s snow is concrete,
Ice is steel and glass:
Concrete, steel, and glass walls
Built to keep me from my past.
The sweet-toothed bards of liberty
In these cold Western lands
Consumed my ancestors like fuel,
For church and state aggrandizement,
To feed the fires of empire, until
Ayiti shouted “No!” bursting through
The concrete, braving bitter chill alone.
…Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies…
My ancestors were buried under Wall Street
And are about to rise up singing.
The truth that sets us free and
Reflects mythically in creeds is but
The cycling of nature and her seasons.
Even concrete crumbles away,
Like Jericho’s wall on trumpet day,
Opening for March rebirth, through the
Vernal equinox of Black Madonna Earth;
Until Juneteenth summer solstice days
Make us whole once more, before
Autumn storms return. So drum and dance
And sacrifice for healing rains to cleanse us all.
…Let it resound
Loud as the rolling seas…
For me the Occupy movement begins to recognize that countless souls throughout the world who have been buried under Wall Street for a very, very long time, and continue to be literally killed and buried, to this day, by seemingly endless and institutionalized greed. So, Occupy also offers hope that all of us might “rise up and sing” the rest of this verse as we join hand in solidarity to make it come true:
Sing a song
Full of the faith
That the dark past
Has taught us
Sing a song
Full of the hope
That the present
Has brought us
Facing the rising sun
Of our new day begun
Let us march on
‘Til victory is won
