Ancestors

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