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George Floyd

CONFLUENCE

To dominate the conflux of the rivers,

the Minnesota with the Mississipi,

a place inhabited for ten thousand years,

Bdote in the local language,

Fort Snelling was built on the bluff above.

The confluence of the rivers was sacred

to the Dakota Sioux, who believed

that their first ancestors had come as spirits

from the stars, and had been made human

from the clay along the riverbanks,

with life breathed into them like a newborn’s cry.

 

***

 

As the West became more settled slaves

were brought to the fort to be bought and sold.

While the Civil War moved from battlefield

to battlefield in the East and the South,

the Dakota, literally starved

of what was theirs by treaty, rose.

On the day after Christmas, and seven days

before Lincoln issued the final

Emancipation Proclamation,

thirty eight Dakota men were hanged

simultaneously, their execution

having been approved by the President –

presumably pour encourager

the remaining two hundred and sixty two

and the families still incarcerated

in the concentration camp at Fort Snelling,

now a National Historic Landmark

in the city of Minneapolis.

 

***

 

A regiment of ‘Buffalo’ soldiers

was stationed at the fort. It comprised

white officers, black troopers and NCOs,

and thus nicknamed by First Nation people

either because the soldiers resisted

bravely like the buffalo or they too

were being used. They saw no action.

The Dakota Sioux had been subdued.

The ‘Indian Wars’, that centuries old

genocide, were continued elsewhere –

and Minneapolis grew brick buildings,

straight paved roads, gas light and water mains.

 

***

 

John Berryman, poet, impassioned teacher,

university professor, a troubled

and a troubling soul, jumped to his death

from the Washington Avenue Bridge,

Minneapolis, onto the west bank

of the Mississipi. In some poems

he has a black-face minstrel persona:

‘I don know, Mr Bones. You asks too much…’

 

***

 

Outside Cup Foods Hot & Cold Deli,

on the roadway, at the intersection of

East 38th and Chicago Avenue,

in the early evening of May 30th,

2020, George Floyd stopped breathing, murdered

by a white man dressed up in a uniform.

 

 

 

THE COLSTON BUN

‘And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.’ DEUTERONOMY 12.3

‘Black deaths do not have a good press, especially when they occur in the custody of our custodians. The media leads the public to believe that our guardians can do no wrong. Racism leads them to believe that blacks can do no right. The silence of the custodial system is compounded by the silences of racism.’ DEADLY SILENCE: BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY, Institute of Race Relations, London, 1991

 

Anger, one Sunday in June, overcame

decorum in that diverse city,

and – no doubt, inspired by the toppling

of other graven tyrants – righteously

pulled down the effigy, with a thump of stone

and a hollow gong of metal, and tossed it

from the quay into the harbour waters.

***

The Royal African Company received

its charter from Charles II and James,

his brother, hence the US east coast seaports

Jamestown and Charleston. It was established

by the restored royals to provide them,

free of interference from the Commons,

with their own spending money. Board members

included the philosopher, John Locke.

The company’s profits came mostly

from enslaving West African men, women

and children, and transporting them across

the North Atlantic’s turbulence. More than

two hundred thousand were taken, and nearly

fifty thousand died on the journey,

the firm’s double entry bookkeeping shows.

 

One prominent member of the board

was Edward Colston, a Bristol merchant,

the city from whose harbour the slavers sailed,

and which, in due course, would make chocolates

and cigarettes. His philanthropy

inveigled the streets like a bad conscience,

almost a rebuke of victimhood:

his name on a hospital, a school,

a bun flavoured with dried currants and allspice

topped with sugar, given to the poor yearly

and still made for sale by local bakeries –

and himself looking thoughtful in bronze

with a periwig and a walking stick.

 

Apologists who claim he was merely

of his time, an accidental racist,

and collateral ethical damage,

like Henry Wills and Elizabeth Fry,

should remember John Locke, his damascene

moment unrecorded, who threw his shares

into the fire. ‘Slavery is so vile and

miserable an estate of man …that ’tis

hardly to be conceived’. That June Sunday

civic anger overcame decorum.

 

 

Note: The above is a revised version of the piece originally published on 25.6.20. The revisions are the result of e discussions with a regular reader, Elise Oliver – please see Comments.