Yesterday, our nation marked the fortieth anniversary of a terrible event, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. In the long history of abuses, that date looms largest for all the obvious reasons. But there are many other dates marked on the internal calendars of those who suffered through those tragic times–the murder of Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15 of the same year, and the brutal murder of a young man named Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. It is that last event that the poet Audre Lorde wrote so powerfully about in what is perhaps her best work, “Afterimages.” It is a fairly long poem, but one well worth the dozen or so reads it deserves. I am posting the third section here. Hopefully, it will compel some people to click on the link above and read the entire poem.

III

I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till
his 15 years puffed out like bruises
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street
and he was baptized my son forever
in the midnight waters of the Pearl.

His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
my eyes averted
from each corner’s photographies
newspapers protest posters magazines
Police Story, Confidential, True
the avid insistence of detail
pretending insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy’s loins
his grieving mother’s lamentation
the severed lips, how many burns
his gouged out eyes
sewed shut upon the screaming covers
louder than life
all over
the veiled warning, the secret relish
of a black child’s mutilated body
fingered by street-corner eyes
bruise upon livid bruise
and wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children’s blood
with savored violence
with pictures of black broken flesh
used, crumpled, and discarded
lying amid the sidewalk refuse
like a raped woman’s face.

A black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi
testing what he’d been taught was a manly thing to do
his teachers
ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jackson
and celebrated in a whorehouse
the double ritual of white manhood
confirmed.