Three Poems
Ashes (David Blount)
The days on the plantation was the happy days
We didn’t mind the work so much because the ground was soft as ashes
hot / Days we would all stop work about
Three in the evening and go swimming in the river
one time there / I
done forgot the year
some white men came / Down the river in a boat / They come
Into the fields and talks to us
They says our master isn’t treating us
right and they says / We ought to be
paid for our work
I laughs at them but some
Fool niggers listen
it appears these men / Give them some guns
after I left and them / Fool niggers listen hold
a meeting the next day in the pack house
So I is lying
Up in the loft and I
Hear them say they going up to the big house
And kill the whole family
I go
Out the window tell the master me / And him
run out to the pack house and quick as lightning
I slam the door shut / The master
locks them niggers in
And then the master yells he yells I’se got
Men and guns out here
throw your guns out
the hole up there in the loft I know
How many guns they got
I count ’em as they throw ’em out
Well the master keeps them shut
up for about a week / On short rations
and at / The end of that
Time he says Dave he says to me I reckon them
niggers am cured for good
And burns the pack house down
Egg (Andrew Boone)
They sold slaves just like people sell / Horses now
they would strip them naked
a / Nigger scarred up or whaled and welted up
he was / Considered a bad nigger
and didn’t bring much
I saw a lot of slaves
Whipped and I was whipped myself
They whipped us with a cobbin paddle
it had 40 holes
They buckled us to barrels whipped us
naked with the paddle
everywhere / There was a hole
It drew a blister
After the whipping with the paddle was over
they took / A cat-o’-nine-tails
and busted the blisters
The next thing was a bath
in salt / Water strong enough
to float an egg
my / Master he checked it
the water himself
Patted the egg
dry with a handkerchief
Clean (Mary A. Bell)
My father’s name was Spot and he was owned
By Mr. Lewis had a mean old
nigger overseer
Who often beat him bloody I
so often think of the hard times / My parents had
In their slave days more often
than I feel my own hard times
My father on Wednesdays and Saturdays
Those were the only days / He was allowed to visit visited
My mother and he often came / In bloody clothes
From beatings and my mother she
would peel those bloody clothes / Off him
my mother she would bathe his sore
places and grease them good
And wash and iron the clothes so he could go back clean
* * *
After a bad one one
Wednesday he came home bloody said he wasn’t going back
Didn’t deserve that beating and he wasn’t going back
And mother begged him not to but he ran away
Hid under houses and in the woods
Three days and he could see the riders hunting him
And after three days weak and hungry gave himself / Up to a nigger
Trader he knew
And begged the nigger trader to
buy him from Mr. Lewis Mr. Lewis was so cruel
But Mr. Lewis wouldn’t sell him would have been
A ruined man / My
father managed all / The other slaves
like no one not even that nigger overseer could
He was the head
man over there
—Shane McCrae, Iowa City, IA
