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El Toro (with annotations) 2
Little Old Black Historian (For John Hope Franklin)
Draft, He Shall Be Nameless
HE SHALL BE NAMELESS Fair Copy 2
![ah crease his paper roun the
Bobby Seale
foldin it slow for his arm.
Them brothers
getting they vitamin D
getting they 7-de/hy/dro
cho/les/ter/ol--
yeah--
when that blackness come
they gonna live.
1970
19[undecipherable]
Black Man, 13th Floor
Hotel Ameridemocratogrando
12 floors below me, 12 above
stops nothing at my life
(this 13th floor
this legacy from black charioteers
swung low, stolen away
ridin middle passage
between the breathin floors
ashcakers brought to bed on clay
massa’s thirteeners](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/f/6/e/f6ec82ae-7f65-4f12-b43a-7a85bf00f73c/attachment/fe86336d9bd0fc2e85e9b07218d94721.jpg)
Black Man, 13th Floor (with annotations) 1
![134
[*“Where Will Their Names Go Down?”: Many bodies of Black people murdered in racist violence have been thrown into the three rivers mentioned--including the body of the boy in “Emmett Till.” The phrase “foundations of the world” comes from the author’s memory of Melville’s treatment of Pip’s terror in Moby Dick, afloat in the sea.*]
[*The title chosen reflects my writing a letter to the New York headquarters of the NAACP (unanswered) suggesting that the names of ordinary African Americans who had suffered violent or severe punishment for demanding their civil rights (especially voting rights then) be recorded in The Congressional Record.*)
Where Will Their Names Go Down?
Where will their names go down,
Our bloodied boys
Sunk link by link--
Socket, bone, and upright knee--
Muscled down dead
In the Tallahatchie, the Mississippi, and the Pearl?
Will they rise again
Except to velvet eyes
And rainbow fins that piece the deep?
Except to flush in streams that knife the seas
And rush their secrets through foundations of the world?
Right before our eyes
They sank, and pulled us to their knees.
From swollen prayers we rise to fiercely shake a chain of days
That blurry hang across that dying scrawl,
That mannish blood that moves
The Tallahatchie, the Mississippi, and the Pearl
1967
1968](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/4/7/7/477bf8a4-0019-4758-ab37-445bdd5b3e26/attachment/d1e75022c8d1f1fadca6aa1d17748f36.jpg)
Where Will Their Names Go Down? (with annotations)
![183
[*”Emmett Till”: The footnote on page 4 of Mailing #1 refers to the murder of the 14-year-old boy. The editors of the anthology Mandals: Literature for Critical Analysis first noted the legendary quality intended in this poem. Chaucer’s story of the rumored whistling by the murdered boy whose throat was cut in the ghetto, as remembered by the poet in this case, made the connection with Emmett Till that inspired the writing of the poem.*]
Emmett Till1
I hear a whistling
Through the water.
Little Emmett
Won’t be still.
He keeps floating
Round the darkness,
Edging through
The silent chill.
Tell me, please,
That bedtime story
Of the fair
River Boy
Who swims forever,
Deep in treasures,
Necklaced in
A coral toy.
1963
1963
1In 1955, Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, was murdered by white men who tied a gin mill fan around his neck and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River.
[*The footnote in the widely-known The Norton Introduction to Poetry, 3d edn, 1986, reads: “In 1955, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly making improper advances toward a white woman.”*]](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/9/a/9/9a9bb7e2-4260-43d7-a93b-b61751891f6f/attachment/10c5511aa0d725d51e9e5a937fa5a868.jpg)
Emmett Till (with annotations)
Panther Man
![190
But dusty roadware, glassy gadgets waiting--
three sign-bound piggies bearing olives
at the border of Seville serve up forgetfulness
of killer tusks and bristly hides;
[*used in an early poem, “Beyond the Clearing”, p.331*]
three desk-borne, tiny monkeys
joined for paperweight, in blotter,
are all we dare of King Kong raging in his pain;
[*road signs in Span and elsewhere*]
and everywhere the dragon selling gasoline,
his black and yellow tongue bereft of sting
(Oh, Toro, Toro
who shrank you down
and drank your blood?).
[*Reference to my abhorrence of viragoes who are also like Dame Van Winkle.*]
Was it lovely Eve, the bullring lady at home the shrew,
who hid her widowed eyes when knives dug at your hearth?
Was it the pinch-faced Leather Duke
who fled the gang fight, left his befriender bleeding,
and ghoulish grew to curse the backs of strangers?
[*See autobiog “A Force in the Field” for this bothersome confrontation with fascist law and courts in Spain of the early 1970’s.*]
Was it the Algeciras judge who held his cigarette like a torch
and stumble-followed it from room to room
holding his court? More likely, then, his tribe of tribers?
those gunhipped, grim-beaked motorcyclists
prick-eared and powered by hornhats aping El Toro?
Or was it the ones who snipped his mighty tail
or lopped his signal ears
or beat the horses to drag his body across the sand?
[Oh, Toro, Toro](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/4/5/7/457a0bf0-c34a-4b01-9947-25acf5c60efe/attachment/17573d9ac26b0cfaa27cac1e8a78331f.jpg)
El Toro (with annotations) 5