LETTER TO MR. FREDERICK DOUGLASS
% OF DAVID W. BLIGHT, FROM YAKIMA/
YAKAMA, MAY, 2021, AFTER COFFEE
WITH THE SHIELD MAKER AND THE POET
Ah, Douglass, we have fall’n on evil days,
Such days as thou, not even thou didst know
“Douglass”, Paul Lawrence Dunbar
And above all, Frederick Douglass.
“The Talented Tenth”, W. E. B. DuBois
Through the ones carrying your story.
W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Dunbar, first grief
after your crossing. For David W. Blight
brings you forward this morning.
First talk at our table, of Crazy Horse,
never photographed. The poet reads
a hand-written copy from Ian Frazier.
“He was never captured because he was so free
that he didn’t know what a jail looked like.”
I can read you the entire thing in two minutes.
With you, Mr. Douglass, with Whitman,
Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Lincoln and Twain,
Crazy Horse: one of the men who came back
for the three of us. Another note, by way
of catching up. Black poets bow
before you in gratitude. Their poems,
markers, apprenticeship, cairns,
for 10,000 ways forward. Eloquent
and caustic sage, Joseph Seaman Cotter, Sr,
crossing time with you, continues,
ones ...of fluent tongue and trashy pen
will strive to imitate thee. Dunbar’s
reach continues: Oh, for thy voice high-sounding
o’er the storm...your presence bringing
blast-defying power. Dunbar’s sonnet
mirroring, seeing as you saw:
...salient, at the cross of devious ways...
Closer to me, Robert Hayden’s sonnet
on freedom--...this beautiful terrible thing
needful to man as air, usable as earth--
when it belongs at last to all as instinct,
brain matter, not gaudy...Douglass
shall be remembered. You, the mentor
in Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Mentors”:
I swear to keep the dead upon my mind…
I’ll stop my casual business. Leave the banquet.
Exceptional one of the talented tenth.
Developing money makers or men,
DuBois asks. No movement without men
like Douglass: Self-trained, but yet trained liberally.
….and so we come to the present—a day
of cowardice and vacillation.
It is May, 2021. My friend is 82 years old,
and we sit unmasked, three of us drinking coffee,
giving books on a birthday to our friend.
Crazy Horse is a prophet, he never ate at a table, one says.
The idea of becoming a farmer never crossed his mind.
We’re not alone with our coffee.
The book is your muse, Frederick Douglass.
I have no creed to uphold, no government to defend,
and as a nation, I belong to none. The land
of my birth welcomes me only as a slave.
A word standing on its own. Said, not said.
David Blight helps me understand Jubilee.
Cancellation and the end of debts, retirement.
He sits with us, too.
My friends and I are not here
to talk about the plague
but you can be certain,
we know what surrounds us.
Like you, Blight delights in the sentence,
and the image: But that was memory
acting as desire for love. About
Blight’s telling, I say this:
Don’t miss the Preface or epigraph.
Prophet keys running from Old Testament
King James Bible through Abraham Heschel.
Hechel couldn’t stand contentment,
crossed Pettus Bridge with King.
Personal cataclysm an entry door.
Blight has the ear for Douglass.
Playmates are natural abolitionists.
We three abolitionists.
Believer and contrarian.
Nineteen months in England. Irish songs.
Imagine the boat ride home.
Every man is an abolitionist,
but every man doesn’t have courage
to liberate others. My favorite Blight story?
You with John Brown. Mine was as
the taper light, his was as the burning sun.
Entire pages underlined. Meeting with John Brown
disguised as a fisherman camped among bleak rocks.
Note in margin—my wife stopping me. OK, Jim,
How can I read my book, if you’re going to read
your book to me? The two of you: compelling.
800 pages one at a time, twice. Naming chapters,
convergence of text and speech, if you get stuck
skip ahead and go back. Don’t miss how
long life reaches the 20th Century, how close
we are in time ourselves. Blight calls you
the prose poet of the body politic. He, too,
fueled by Haden’s poem. ...legacies bleeding
forward from slavery and color lines.
His magnificent final sentence.
Stay a bit.
*
Sojourner Truth sits in the front row listening
as Frederick Douglass speaks. On this occasion,
this life. Adopted story. Children of Israel.
Intimate photos—Douglass and Heschel
alongside each other. Influenced images?
King making the Hebrew Bible
central to Civil Rights, Christianity.
Didn’t Douglass do this, David Blight?
Watching a movie this morning on PBS.
Hassidism. Mysticism.
The Audacity of Heschel.
Audacity of Douglass. Overcome by God.
Somewhereness, everywhereness.
That kind of wonder after a bicycle ride.
Like Crazy Horse. Because he was
never the Indian on the nickle.
I’m an abolitionist.
My friends as well.
Three abolitionists.
Crazy Horse on the lawn with Douglass.
Witness-box, jury-box, ballot-box.
And the imagination. Add that.
Ancient wisdom and metaphor.
Turned loose to the open sky.
Jim Bodeen
2018-2021
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