The Mystery Man in the Black Hat

Speaks

BY Q U I N C Y T R O U P E

I am the spirit of the dead African man lost in the Atlantic during
storms and murders crossing those terrible waters during the Middle
Passage. My spirit though mixed in a mélange with blood of
Cherokees and the spirits of Tom Ridge Tom Ross the Apache
warrior Geronimo the Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and the Shawnee
Chief Tecumseh and his younger brother Tenskwatawa the one-eyed
prophet and a whole lot of others. I rise up out of the ground out of
the rivers walk and cut through mist fog tornado clouds hurricane
winds come out of the ground from cracks of earthquakes the
flaming lava of volcanoes and come here to this Mississippi River
not far from Cahokia where the ancestors came upriver from the
gulf and built those pyramids there to spite the white man. So I
double/cross through the upside-down question mark of this here
shining steel arch down here on the levy of Sad Louis and emerge
from behind the polished steel and come out to greet you here to
bring you a message but I can see you ain't ready yet so eye done
changed my mind and I'm gon' walk back through the roiling
rolling fog and mist until you ready to talk to me righteously
because I am the voodoo spirit of African Indian double-take of
cross-fertilization here in this cruel conflicted place called America. I
am the double-back winding swamp snake who can cure these
tortured spirits living here in this hellfire & brimstone place if only
they will listen to me tell them the righteous truth. But until then I
will come and go as I please as I want to sliding through the night
with my mojo bone and juba shaking feather and appear whenever
and wherever it suits me in my black hat and black cape sometimes
riding a black horse and carrying a black whip that is my tongue
that cracks and slips through the language we speak like a black
mamba snake I move fast as an out-of-control brushfire strike
deadly quick as a drone's exploding missile and then I'm gone just
like that in the blinking flash of an eye.

Quincy Troupe, "The Mystery Man in the Black Hat Speaks" from

Errançities. Copyright © 2012 by Quincy Troupe. Reprinted by permission

of Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org.

Source: Errançities (Coffee House Press, 2012)

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