Tradition: A Perilous Age in a Black Girl’s Life
The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.... When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them begin to bribe her with presents.
—Harriet Jacobs
A chill pricks my heart when I read the name
of the third enslaved girl to bear a child at age fifteen,
conception like clockwork proclaimed.
Some gossip to blame for declaring first blood:
ovulation oblique invitation on the plantation.
I pause to record the names of the nascent enslaved
and the many who have since taken the bodies of black women,
bending them to the will of money, science, nothing.
A soul and body dubbed commodity, chattel, property.
I learned something of this game
in a basement to an Isley Brothers’ jam,
no warning beyond Would you like to dance
then hardness ground into a hip
beneath some dude’s double-knits.
Wanting to run but pinned by a palm holding mine
in a roomful of swaying bodies and sweat shine
until the prayed-for end to that innocence-usurping time.
Something’s cooking in the kitchen and in the fields,
it’s bubbling up babies, sun scorching brow and hands.
Pick me a wonder, pick me a dream, how many hands
does it take to make heaven, a dearth of freedom
in this godforsaken land.
Source: Poetry (May 2021)