Soul Arises, Soul Survives, Soul Cries

By John W. Fountain

John W. Fountain’s book available in January 2019.

By John W. Fountain

Soul Migration. Celebration. Apocalyptic Reverberations. Transatlantic Middle Passage. Sandwiched huddled human masses. I taste the salty Breath of Death as a slave ship passes. Anchoring in American ports of hate. Transported to Southern Plantations cruel and sunbaked Stripped of language, culture and freedom’s imaginations. By fear and the gun, we suffer slave indoctrination.

Soul Deprivation.

Soul arises

Soul survives

Soul cries…

Massa’s lash upon our backs. Keloid scars where the skin once cracked. And the blood ran warm. Our babies born. Into Incarceration. Generation after Generation. Human property to a hypocritical nation. Our blood, sweat and skin at its foundation. Pure Evil Manifestation. 250 years to The Great Emancipation.

We stood

Filled with Bittersweet Sensations

In fiery winds of subjugation

White rationalization

Painting in broad strokes of Black Code justification

As Jim Crow spread like fresh morning dew

And the horror of American slavery was born anew:

Bone-breaking

Lynch-making

Life-taking

Godforsaken

Hate

Our Souls at stake.

Soul Arises

Soul survives…

The city of Chicago represented a northern city of promise for migrating Southern blacks.

Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” resonates. Even as we make our Great Escape from Plantation Segregation. Sharecropping Intimidation. Mass Confiscation of black bodies to feed “Antebellum Cotton Kingdom.”

So we sing: Freedom songs along the Road to Canaan. They ring. All along our trail of tears and hope. Along Highways 51 & 61. Aboard the Illinois Central Railroad.

We bring our Souls from bitter Egypt to sweet Chicago. City of Broad Shoulders. Northern Star of light. “Land of Lincoln,” Point Du Sable, and the big city shining bright. Pregnant with promise. Perfumed with possibility. Prickling with potential. Cause for celebration. Soul Migration.

SOUL CRIES…

By our culture, soul and hands, we transformed this land. Laborers in industry. Interwoven in the city’s tapestry. Black Mecca — Chicago. Transplant Home of the Delta Blues. Birthplace of Gospel Music. Of Chicago Defender news.

Inspiration for Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and “Native Son.” City from where we shouted, “Run Jesse Run.”

The election of Barack Obama, Chicago’s adopted native son, to the U.S. Presidency, was among the most celebrated moments for African Americans.

The setting for Lorraine Hansberry’s, “A Raisin In The Sun.” Where a Renaissance in Bronzeville was birthed by migrant daughters and sons, like Louis Armstrong and Gwendolyn Brooks and Ida B. Wells. Where the election of Harold Washington made our hearts swell. Like the election of a migrant son to the highest office in the land: Barack Obama as President. The first African American.

And yet, Soul cries…

Metropolis, rising like skyscrapers tickling cotton clouds

“Great Society”

Shoulders to the grindstone

“Blacks Finally Allowed”

We stood proud, fists clenched around that check once marked “insufficient funds.” Believing our time had finally come. Though later realizing it was only for some as integration proved a One-Way Street. And upward social mobility in the ‘hood predestined some of us to flee.

Leaving behind the poorest of the poor. The “Truly Disadvantaged” with only trap doors. Between them and us. Between you and me. To dwell in reimagined segregation. To drown in poverty’s sea.

Soul cries…

Tanaja Stokes, 8, and pictured in a memorial card, was shot and killed while jumping rope in her South Side neighborhood in 2010. She is one of thousands of homicide victims in Chicago over the last eight years alone.

Hope became the hood. And the hood forsook the good of the Soul as crack-cocaine laid strangle hold. And the powers-that-be neglected and stole. And guns and gangs grew like wild weeds — so bold. And systemic racial oppression and schemes untold isolated the hood. Caused the hood to implode. The evaporation of a dream. Like wisps of steam. Or was it all just a scheme? How can life in the city be so cold and mean?

The ghost of Billie Holiday today now sings an old song with a familiar ring:

Northern streets bear a strange fruit

Blood on the alleys and blood at the stoop

Black bodies twisted in the Northern breeze

Strange fruit lying on unpopular streets…

Strange Fruit in a once Promised Land. Where black folks perish mostly by black folks’ hands.

And the children Die. Their Blood cries. Under a school-day sun. Where they dream of escaping bloody pools that run, sometimes like rivers here on the darkest side of fear — cascading waterfalls of endless tears — beneath the veneer in the Promised Land here. Where Genocide & Mass incarceration gnaw at the soul of a nation.

Soul cries

For Soul yearns to survive

Soul —

Breath

Life

Metaphysical translucent indomitable essence whose presence drifts from the bowels of history along the continuum of eternity. Soul. That still speaks from the graves of our ancestors of slavery. That endows courage and bravery.

Soul — spirit that sails on the winds of hope. That sings only one note. That captures fear and conquers feeble imaginations. That preserved us through Jim Crow and Segregation. That whispered harmonies and melodies. Of rhapsodies sublime. That soothed our wounds.

And healed our minds. Soul.

Even amid apocalyptic reverberations. Amid genocide, poverty, racism and mass incarceration. Even amid premature autopsies on the death of nation. The depths of our soul will be our salvation.

For Soul arises

Soul survives

Soul cries…

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com

Website: www.author.johnwfountain.com