I am Blessed; I am Black America

[Ramona L. Hyman]

I’m Blessed; I am Black America

I ‘m Blessed; I am Black America

I am Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage.”

I took a voyage through death/

To life upon these [America] shores. . . .

I am Phillis Wheatley

Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land, 
Taught my benighted soul to understand 
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too. . . .

I am Dudley Randalls Harriet Tubman

   . . .the General. . .the Moses. . . the stealer of slaves

I am the greatest event of the nineteen century;

I am President Abraham Lincoln’s

Emancipation Proclamation:

That on  the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one  thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves  within any State . . .or designated part of a State, the people whereof  shall then be in rebellion against the  . . . . forever free. . . .

I tell you I am blessed; I am Black America

Like Langston Hughes,

I’ve know rivers ancient as the world and older than the

Flow of human blood in human veins

My soul has grown deep like the rivers

I am Michael Harper’s “American History”:

Those four black girls burn up

In that Alabama Church

Are the "sixty million and more"

Still at the bottom of the sea

But I’m Blessed; I am Black America

I am Fannie Lou Hammer’s Black breath

Telling coloreds they have a right to vote

I am the sister of Viola Gregg Liuzzo

That white woman from Detroit

She’s in the car with the boy

Is that Leroy Moten in that car. He scared, they scared

Knowing freedom coming hearing hate

Shooting into her car

I am am the the sister of Viola Gregg Liuzzo

She died for my right to vote.

I am blessed

I am Etheridge Knight’s “Idea of Ancestry”

I am Amir Baraka’s "KABA."

  ... beautiful people

with african imaginations

full of masks . . .

am with african eyes, and noses, and arms, 

I  Martin Luther King’s

Child with flessy locks and a dark complexon

Who will inject new meaning into the veins of

History and civilization

 I am President Barack Hussein Obama's "audacity of hope."

In November of 2012, I shall vote for him once, AGAIN

 Yes, I’m Blessed; I am Black America

 

 by Ramona L. Hyman, PhD