“The wonderful things we have done on this planet and the horrible things we have done on this planet, both have come from the human mind.” — Sadhguru, founder and head of the Isha Foundation

It’s been a little over three years since the world erupted in protest after George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minnesota police officer. When “It” first happened, for several days, I woke in the middle of the night from a restless sleep and touched my neck. It was still there. I was still alive. 

A few days earlier, I’d accidentally glimpsed the brutal act of a white police officer’s knee on Floyd’s neck and I quickly looked away.  

A bitterness rose up inside me, a 400-year history of dispossession, Black bodies being transported out of Africa, Black bodies in chain gangs in the Deep South, Black bodies being forced out of whites-only swimming pools before they were filled with concrete. I swallowed it. All night, I heard my South Central L.A. neighbors simmering with disbelieving belief, horror, anguish, emotions all too familiar. 

The next day, avoiding watching TV, something unthawed and I cried for several hours until I splashed water on my face. Forcing myself to keep my routine, I drove to Culver City and fast-walked in a neighborhood mostly occupied by white homeowners. I touched my neck often.

I forged on, trying to avoid the airspace of other people because this was May 2020 and COVID was still happening. But at some point, the walking to forget didn’t help, and the image of the white knee on a Black neck slipped into my mind like a knife from a sleeve: I couldn’t breathe through my mask and had to stop so I didn’t hyperventilate or throw up. I considered putting my sunglasses back on so no one could see me, the wreck I was becoming, the unfolding of despair. But I decided, no, white America should see me. 

Today, they should see my neck.

While there have been some reforms to policing in the years since George Floyd’s tragic murder, there has also been backlash to those reforms, many of which don’t go far enough to curtail police brutality in the first place. Activists and protesters continue to call for the defunding of the police, for accountability in the form of body cameras and more. But deaths and brutality persist. Police killed more people in 2022 than in any other year in the past decade, according to the Mapping Police Violence database. Black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed, but 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed during those incidents. The gruesome treatment of Ralph Yarl, a Black teen who was shot on a porch by a white man when Yarl rang the wrong doorbell, illustrates how Black people are often unsafe doing routine activities.

Meanwhile, poets act as the watchmen and watchwomen: We do the work of excavating meaning from Black deaths. As poets, we celebrate our resilience while calling out continued injustice. Our poems also express frustration with having to retell the story of Black deaths due to the lack of systemic change. In “not an elegy for Mike Brown,” the Minneapolis poet Danez Smith writes, “I am sick of writing this poem/but bring the boy. his new name/his same old body.” The project of writing about the struggle of Black Americans extends as far back as the birth of this country when, in the 1700s, an enslaved woman, Phillis Wheatley, began writing poems. During the Jim Crow period, poet-novelist Richard Wright wrote about Black people being murdered by white lynch mobs.

I can’t remember the first time I was introduced to the image of a Black body hanging from a tree. Was it in Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”? Maybe my high school history book (pre-book banning era)? A movie? The derogatory racist ads in old magazines and post cards? I do remember that my understanding of that image shifted at the age of 11 when I read Richard Wright’s “Between the World and Me.” In the poem, the speaker, presumably a Black man, stumbles upon the aftermaths of a lynching. The poem showed lynching to be a heinous communal act:  

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgotten

upon a cushion of ashes.

There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt

finger accusingly at the sky, (…)

A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,

and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.

And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,

butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a

drained gin-flask, and a whore’s lipstick;

Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the

lingering smell of gasoline.

And through the morning air the sun poured yellow

surprise into the eye sockets of the stony skull…

The only difference between Wright’s work and our work is that today’s activists have the protection of laws intended to punish murderers, but those laws don’t always provide us with justice. This is why poets write. This is why I write.

The descriptive phrases “butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes,” “a whore’s lipstick,” “smell of gasoline,” “scattered traces of tar” provide an account of the evolution of the reprehensible lynching, from the gathering of the elated crowd to the pouring of the gasoline. The poem lays out the evidence of a crime that involved many people. At least one woman was present. “Peanut shells” appear in the poem to indicate that the murdering of the Black man was entertainment, like watching a movie or a ballgame. In all, some 6,400 Black people were lynched in America since the end of the Civil War, not including those that occurred after 1950. I see 6,400 separate episodes, incidents and acts of terror — I see a group of like-minded white people who decided that hanging a Black man or woman, often preceded or followed by the mutilation of the Black body, was a good idea, something they could live with for the rest of their lives, that their children could witness, that God would understand?

I first read this poem in the book I am the Darker Brother, published in 1968. I continued to reread this poem and that book because  they explored the realities of Black lives and the treatment of Black bodies as experienced by the “New Negro” poets of the Harlem Renaissance and, later, the Black Power poets. In each rereading of Wright’s poem, I couldn’t help but wonder how people who took part in a lynching justify their presence, the act of violence and/or their belief  that someone had done something to warrant such a hideous death. Moreover, what allowed for a lynching to become a social or community event?