A Collective Cry of The Souls of Black Folks
For The People of Chicago’s West Side, Especially For The Children, And For the “West Sides” All Over The World
For The People of Chicago’s West Side, Especially For The Children, And For the “West Sides” All Over The World
By John W. Fountain
This book is my story — my song. A tribute, especially to the memories of murdered black children whose premature autopsies have created a familiar sad song to which we have become too accustomed. “Soul Cries,” in one sense, is an urban opera set in the key of life. One that sings of the ancestral past, of the present and of future struggles, of the triumphs and glories of a people but also of our fears, of the strain, drain and consequence upon our souls.
It is an inspirational song — a story — that emanates from a place where the voices of those who dwell there often are not heard. At its best, this is perhaps a collective cry of the souls of black folk.
One that ranges in scope from a poetic essay that juxtaposes southern lynchings against the new “strange fruit” of black bloodies lying lifeless in Chicago streets — a toll of mostly young black men murdered in Chicago. To the triumph, glory, joys and even the splendor of black life that blare like the melancholy wail of Miles Davis’ trumpet against a peach-colored sun slowly setting on a summer horizon.
This book is a West Side story. One birthed in my joys and sorrows of growing up on the other side of the tracks.
One nursed in a decades-long career of capturing as journalistic scribe and also native son the humanity and countless tragedies that too often are reduced to sound bites and briefs upon the daily American news platter.
Those tragedies, whether in the form of poverty or socioeconomic and educational deprivation and miseducation, homicide, or the systemic racial hate and discrimination that have sought to disembowel the black body from the black soul, are at the heart of my soul’s cry.
Mine is a cry filled with anguish but also hope. With tears but also joy.
With disdain over the insidious and sinister circumstance and systems that have created this great chasm between “us” and “them” and that leaves my soul sometimes drifting on a bittersweet wind, though compelling me to leave record of my soul’s cry behind.
This book is my best effort of composing a collective soul’s cry — ignited by my own words to others over the critical import of telling our own stories, words not lost on this messenger. So let me now declare:
We must tell our own stories.
Let Our Voices Resound
Let them ring from the depths of our souls
Wet with the tears of our ancestors
That it may fertilize the ground
For present generations
And for generations to come
Let the stories of our collective tears, triumphs and also sufferings
Be the Golden Sun
That shall be the warmth of other daughters and sons
And let not our dreams of writing be deferred to fester & run
Tell Our Stories
In the fullness of their redemptive splendor
Filled with the myriad complexities of
Life, Love and Tender
Memories
Of Rhapsodies
And countless Subtleties
Of our world
In our time
Pungent with the
Fragrance of our music
Rhythms & Rhymes
Of what obstacles we faced
Of those we embraced
Of the bridges we constructed
Of those who obstructed
And of those who denied us Justice
The story of how we overcame
And let us forget not the bittersweet reminiscences
Of those who were slain
Felled by homicidal rain
Flooded by crimson blood-filled rivers of pain
By consuming waters of raging insanity
On destructive cresting waves of man’s inhumanity
So that there is a record for all eternity
Lest the “hunters” rewrite the story of you and me
Tell the story
Tell the story…
Of how we prevailed
Of how we assailed
Against the centuries-old war against the “Black Body”
The story of how we overcame
By the ancestral strength of the Black Soul
By some times —
Bathing in the tide of Negro spirituals and hymns
That washed over us
Made us feel whole
At other times —
Standing in the sweetly scented memories
and the dignity
of the Unbroken Slave
whose indomitable unsleeping spirit
still rises & speaks from the grave
Tell the story
Of Black Love
Of Black Romance
Of pure burning Black Passion
And old-school, yearning
Of Black slow dancing
Of Black Kisses
And infinite Black Bliss
Of Black Christmases
And Black hopes, Black dreams and Black wishes
Tell the story
Of our song that wafts upon honeysuckle melodies
Of the blues
And jazz
Upon improvisations
And musical interpretations
And divinely inspired creations
Seasoned with the majestic poetries
And incomparable manifestations —
Of Black Life
Tell the story…
Of our hopes
And dreams
Of painted portraits of bursting white sprays
From red fire hydrants
On hot summer days
As black children laugh and play
Beneath cloudless, blue ghetto skies
And no grieving mother’s cries…
Of Bid Whist games
And backyard parties
Of Pentecostal Sunday mornings
Of no fatalities and no pathologies.
Tell the story…
Of why Kaepernick knelt
Of why Trayvon Martin
Philando Castile
Eric Garner & Laquan McDonald
Were dealt
The penalty of death
At racism’s hand
Denied Due Process
In Freedom’s Land
Where Liberty still remains elusive
And Discrimination’s Plan
to suppress, dispossess and disenfranchise
The Black Man
And wearing black face and hooded white robes of the Ku Klux Klan
Are still at hand
Still…
400 years after black slaves
Arrived in Jamestown in the year 1619
Still facing
These same old systemic issues in the year 2019
And yet, still we rise.
Tell Your Story
Put simply, this book is a literary collection of one man’s reflections on living while black in America. A psalm of the afflictions endured by the black body, and of the resilience of black folks’ souls that have been bathed in the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors — and that are still tormented at this present time — on this the quadricentennial of our arrival as slaves upon American shores. A compilation of the innermost reflections, thoughts and feelings of the experience of being black and American and of our longing as a people still to someday be free. It is at its core one black man’s soul’s cry for freedom. A familiar song sung by our ancestors, ringing with the chorus, “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday.” This is my soul’s cry.
Email: Author@johnwfountain.com
Buy Soul Cries here: www.johnwfountain.com
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John W. Fountain
JOHN W. FOUNTAIN is an award-winning journalist, professor and author of the memoir, True Vine: A Young Black Man's…www.amazon.com
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