And sing the song she liketh best.
XXXI.
I am not mad, – I am black!
I see you staring in my face, –
I know you staring, shrinking back, –
Ye are born of the Washington race!
And this land is the Free America, –
And this mark on my wrist, – (I prove what I say)
Ropes tied me up here to the flogging-place.
XXXII.
You think I shrieked then? not a sound!
I hung as a gourd hangs in the sun;
I only cursed them all around
As softly as I might have done
My own child after. From these sands
Up to the mountains, lift your hands
O Slaves, and end what I begun.
XXXIII.
Whips, curses! these must answer those!
For in this UNION, ye have set
Two kinds of men in adverse rows,
Each loathing each! and all forget
The seven wounds in Christ’s body fair;
While He sees gaping everywhere
Our countless wounds that pay no debt.
XXXIV.
Our wounds are different – your white men
Are, after all, not gods indeed,
Nor able to make Christs again
Do good with bleeding. We who bleed, –
(Stand off!) – we help not in our loss,
We are too heavy for our cross,
And fall and crush you and your seed.
XXXV.
I fall, – I swoon, – I look at the sky!
The clouds are breaking on my brain:
I am floated along, as if I should die
Of Liberty’s exquisite pain!
In the name of the white child waiting for me
In the deep black death where our kisses agree, –
White men, I leave you all curse-free,
In my broken heart’s disdain!
Note
Elizabeth’s brother, Sam, died at Cinnamon Hill in Jamaica on 17 February 1840. In July of that year, Bro, the brother to whom Elizabeth was closest, and two of his friends, with an able seaman, William White, were inexplicably drowned and the boat lost near to Torquay on a calm and windless day. Bro’s body was washed up on a beach in August.
Elizabeth completed ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ while on honeymoon with Robert Browning. Early manuscripts show that at one time she was considering writing from the perspective of a black man; she then changed the main protagonist to a female slave. Elizabeth says in a letter to Miss Mitford that the work is based on stories told to her by her cousin Richard, an illegitimate cousin of her father who lived in Jamaica. The poem is set in America and was first published in the Boston anti-slavery publication, The Liberty Bell, in 1848.
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