Will We Ever Breathe Free?

by Ernie McCray

We Black folks
always wonder
if we’ll ever breathe free,
like others of our species,
ever since
we, caught napping,
were snatched
from our homeland
as kidnappees
and stacked
in boats
as contraband
and dumped
in shacks
as un-hired hands,
spending our lives
standing rigidly
for centuries
bent over long cotton sacks
strapped
over our
weary overburdened
shoulders and backs,
pulling and picking
and humming and singing
of sweet chariots
swinging low,
“coming for
to carry us home”
from the rising of the sun
until the sweet darkness
of the night
when the toiling of the day
was done,
a few vittles,
a night’s sleep
and then another day comes,
a mirror of all the other ones.
And one day
we were told that we were free,
and before we could breathe in
a sigh of relief
along came Jim Crow
with tons more grief:
lynch mobs
and firehoses
and cops
and sheriffs
swinging billy clubs
on horseback,
on foot,
in cars,
on hogs,
with dogs
having no idea
they’re “man’s best friend”
and when this behavior
slowed to an end,
and we began
to relax
and take deep breaths
of freedom in,
we found ourselves up against
new forms of indignities;
apartment vacancies
no longer
available suddenly;
entrances into colleges
and universities
earned affirmatively
becoming “reverse discrimination,”
a new definition
in the dictionary.
And now,
due to smart phone
technology
we see
and mourn
our loved ones who
are shot un-armed,
or die
because
they can’t breathe
under the weight
of a policeman’s knee…

But since this can’t
go on for an eternity,
the reply to
“Will we ever breathe free?”
is being answered
as we can see
all the young people
addressing
long deferred hopes and dreams
of liberty
every time
they take to the streets,
signifying in the fervor
of their demeanor:
We shall breathe free.

Some day.