In Which Carmen Writes Graphic Poetry

[xaara]

I was wandering through Separate is not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education when I chanced across a photograph of a crowd before a gallows. Atop the gallows was a fuzzy and indistinct group of figures, but even with the distance and poor-quality early photo it was easy to tell that only one was black. The caption below said that the black man--boy, really--had been a learning-disabled citizen accused of raping a white woman. He was soaked in oil, set on fire, tortured, and hanged. The photo made me almost physically sick, but what was worse was the complete lack of emotion in the caption. I know it's a museum and therefore should not pass judgment even on something so obviously wrong, but the fact that emotions did not enter at all into the summary of the lynching shook me. Of course, since it affected me, it gets its own poem.

Warning for explicit violence.

To A Young Man Publicly Lynched

Were you a virgin when you died there, screaming
for Hell or Heaven to take you, losing
God in those final moments, because it is then,
just before death, that we are human only.
I can smell the skin bubbling off you--did you know
that blood boils just like Mama’s soup? Or like
water for tea or even pasta sauce? Little things.
Your blood boiled from the oil-fed fire
and your skin melted, slid down
over the muscles and liquid fat of your belly,
catching your outthrust hips, your twisted
writhing legs. Sight was the first sense
to go, wasn’t it? You closed your eyes
just before they overheated, exploded, spattered
nerve endings across your face.
Then smell, hearing, taste. Touch lingered
until the end, while you tore
at your bonds, cried and raged, begged
and went still, lungs smoke-filled, bone exposed,
eyelids open around cauterized sockets.
In case you weren’t dead yet, they hanged you,
left you dangling upon the stage, swinging
in the humid summer breeze.