Let our voices resound from the depths of our souls

It has been said: “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” That is why we must tell our own stories. So tell the story …

Let our voices resound. Let them ring from the depths of our souls, wet with the tears of our ancestors. That they 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 is the warmth of future daughters and sons. And let not our writing dreams be deferred, allowed to languish, fester and 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, our rhythms & our rhymes. Of the obstacles we faced. Of those we embraced.

Of the bridges we constructed. Of those who obstructed. And of those who denied us justice. Tell 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. …

Unedited, unfiltered and uncensored by stereotypes or systemic hate. Our stories, which stand as living testimonies. As sacred unalterable histories through which generations may, in the words of James Weldon Johnson, “Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.” A song “full of the hope that the present has brought us.”

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, by standing in the sweetly scented memories and the dignity of the unbroken slaves whose indomitable, unsleeping spirits still rise and speak from their graves.

Tell the story. … Of Black Love. Of Black Romance. Of pure burning Black Passion

Of that old school yearning, Black Slow Dancing. Of Black Kisses. And infinite Black Bliss.

Of Black Christmases. Black Hopes, Black Dreams and Black Wishes.

Of our song that wafts upon honeysuckle melodies of the blues and jazz. Of improvisations and musical interpretations and divinely inspired creations seasoned with the majestic poetries and incomparable manifestations of Black Life.

Of our hopes and dreams. Of painted portraits of white sprays bursting 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. …

Tell the story. … 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 and Laquan McDonald were dealt the penalty of death at racism’s hand. Denied due process in Freedom 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 … Four hundred years after African slaves arrived in Jamestown in the year 1619. Still. …

Still facing these same old systemic issues in the year 2019. And yet, still we rise.

Tell the story …

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com