TBT: School of Fish Revisited

Paper coming unglued, colors fading.  I just made anew, an old work, of shifting name, the latest "A Flight for Unity".  Now redone, fish on new acrylic painted canvas paper, the base a patina of resin, to keep the watercolor from fading and blue painters tape drying, she now comes with a new poem.  For Carolyn.  A bit past black history month, but perfect for also for women's history month.

For Carolyn Greer, NCHS Class of 1965

Sometimes we walk among giants

Heroes, whom we call by other names

With venom or salacious smile, jigaboo or nigger

Or if polite or kind, colored girl or negro,

Rarely, which some still refuse to do

Call her by her name

We can blame the age, we can blame our teenage

Society or religion, but we can denote

That beneath those guises

humanity sometimes arises

She was a first

The first, a negro in our class

among the tribe of teens 

classes by social status

athlete or scornfully academic

by wealth or poverty

by town, and there by side of the tracts

farm, town or family ties

secure in our supreme color

until Carolyn broke the mold

That was her, the giant, quiet, and respectful

not haughty, proud or pretty

just a gentle, smiling without malice

alarmingly without façade

Car-o-lyn, her one assertive gesture

discreet, affirmative

She broke us, this quiet lady

the mold those centuries had built

Jim Crowe and malice had constructed

She swam against the current

To break the bondage of slavery

Not quite lost, grits upon the teem

colonial coronels  and southern belles

confederate fiction believed as gospel true

Tara and Rhett Butler, the antebellum froth

glued the savage whites together

In hypothetic piety, in the Lord’s whitewashed house

Out of our teenage innocence,

Clothed in ignorance

Humanity wrapped in garments

Violently sealed in evangelical words

Carolyn helped us take the baby steps

into the sunlight of the possible heaven

the dream of colorblindness

of unity and honor,

and oh, yes, truth, justice and a maybe

to quote the Superman, the true American way

14 March 2019; Women’s Month