Freedom at Sunrise

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by L. Teresa Church

Freedom at Sunrise
(Dedicated to Lenard D. Moore and Evie Shockley)

   November morning turns jubilee
   when black-velvet night retreats
   like rope-pulleyed curtains parting.
   Sun rises red then yellows,
   flickers along the treeline,
   covers Carolina cottonfields
   before harvest.

   Raised like battle swords against the "big house,"
   silver rays illuminate the six-acre lawn
   tended by an icon preserved from days past,
   the slump-shouldered man
   whose aging brown face bows
   in twenty-first-century obedience,
   as he rakes leaves beneath my shuttered window.

   In this antique room
   with cane-bottom chairs, drop-leaf tables
   four-poster canopied bed,
   I've kept fitful sleep,
   burned lamps like torches on tabletops
   amidst whisper sounds,
   death clocks ticking, ticking,
   as ghosts stocking-footed their way
   along the spiral staircase
   just beyond my door, locked,
   a chair jammed beneath the knob.

   On the evening past,
   this plantation house revealed dark secrets,
   specters rapping against outside doors.
   An apparition floating through passageways.
   A thin-haired old man
   wearing a long white night shirt,
   come back from the grave, no doubt,
   bothered that free-born nigras
   are guests here, seated and served at a table
   once reserved for those privileged
   to decide fates through bills-of-sale
   drawn up and signed
   over dishes prepared by Negro cooks.

   Strong like our holy-oiled hands,
   three poets, invited,
   we will speak poems into autumn air.
   Without knowing the history,
   yet imagining horrors
   tangled around this homestead,
   we let words settle into ears listening,
   as we step through stanzas
   filled with blues and jazz,
   romance in England and France,
   memories of Martin and Malcolm,
   quilts and stories about homeplaces
   far from this place.

   Summoning spirits:
   calloused-palm field hands,
   wet nurses and house negresses,
   backs bloodied at whipping posts,
   we strip limbs from hanging-trees,
   read out rights of passage,
   walk towards freedom
   in a throng.

L. Teresa Church is a playwright, freelance writer, arts consultant, quiltmaker, and poet. She resides in Durham, North Carolina.