Post on 04-Apr-2018
7/30/2019 Before Django
1/2
Walter Rhett Before Django
The Middle Passage, Tom Feelings
Before Django
Before the movie, Django, Robert Hayden, Fisk University
librarian and Poet of the Library of Congress, wrote "The
Middle Passage." In this poem, he describes the experiences of
the Atlantic slave trade in the voice of a slave trader. The voice
of the cruel perpetrator of a brutal, ignoble, inhuman, death-
filled passage, gains its poetic credibility by the sympathy andhorror it elicits.
Imagine an African-American poet writing in Tennessee in the
1940s. A poet who creates a sympathetic voice for the human
who loads hunger and death on his ships for profit, and that
hunger and death are the masks of human beings. Long before
the movie, Django, African-Americans developed a cultural
tradition that dealt with the paradox of life and death staring ateach other across the dark, reeking holes of slave ships.
Reports from Charleston say slave ships could be smelled five
miles downwind. They were cleaned with red hot lead rolled
over planks. The heat scorched the stench embedded in the
wood.
7/30/2019 Before Django
2/2
Walter Rhett Before Django
Ironically, the ships changed the feeding patterns of the great
white sharks. Slavery altered the ocean's ecology as the sharksfollowed the ships to feast on the bodies thrown overboard.
And like Samuel L. Jackson in the movie, Hayden described a
black collaborator, King Anthracite.
A long, powerful tradition of memory and commemoration, of
a faith born in the bramble, lies beyond controversy on the
screen. A painful truth became a passage of greater
transcendence. Long gone bones mark the trail of freedom. Thelong knives of the flashing white teeth of their suffering
became a jubilee celebration, rejoicing as they sleep.
Two Elephants Mobile Publishing
America's Mobile Publisher,
Devoted to Public and Oral Traditions,
and Great Design