Transcription: The Hampton Project, 2012
Here and there you peek out from behind history’s veil and glimmers of your brilliance can be seen in the contours shaping the dimensions of the New World. Before and After become the hallmark of your existence. Before the past and before the future and after the opening of the sea. Before first contact there are the thousand and one tales of before and one after, maybe.
Before Columbus and the invention of the New World, before Stanley and Livingstone, the Portuguese and the Dutch, and King Leopold. Before the British and after the Revolution, and the exacting hand of tyranny. Before Jefferson’s democracy and after Jackson’s invading army. Before Lewis and Clark and the Mason-Dixon line. Before Manifest Destiny. The March of Industry and after the opening of the West.
Before the first trade beads were traded and after human flesh was weighed in gold, ounce for ounce for ounce. Before the Trail of Tears and after the mise-en-scène of the Middle Passage; before you became labor and capital combined, and the source of vast and vacant lands. And after you became key in the Mother of Invention, spinning Ginny’s cotton into gold.
Before King Cotton and Queen Rice, and after the blue notes of indigo and the red Cherokee rose. Before your resistance and after you knew you fought the same ole men, the same ole men who thought the world was flat. Before you tilled the soil into the ground and after your bodies were no longer useful. Before you were freed and after an assassin’s bullet. Before clandestine operations, covert actions and the maddening twist of your slaughter.
Before the gargantuan needs of the New Republic, and after you became a clear and present danger on your own land, in your own house. Imagine. Before the change in Indian policy and after the Bible, the blanket, the bottle, the bullet, and the fall of the last buffalo. Before Custer’s Last Stand, the Sun Dance, the Ghost Dance, and the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Before the reign of terror and the nights of vengeance, and after the smoke cleared and the dust settled. After Sitting Bull, after Crazy Horse, after your loss of meaning, your permanent fixing, and the scattering of your tribe. And long before you forgot what was what and who was who; Lakota, Dahomey, Seminole, Sioux.
Before wild west shows, minstrel shows, and circus acts and after your clowning days were over. Before Indian head nickels and buffalo dimes. Before the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves, and the Cleveland Indians.
Before the end of authenticity and the beginning of cultural tourism. Before your image and mission furniture became highly collectible, and museums crammed their vaults with your blankets and beads, and bones. Before dashed hopes, lost dreams, and the endless weeping of women. Before any and all of this, before any and all of this.
Through this fractured lens of history, you arrived. You arrived along the shore of the Chesapeake from across vast expanses, from worlds within worlds and cultures older than the ancient ruins of time. Creek and Seminole, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, Dakota, Sioux, from lands as far away as Djenne, Nigeria, Senegal, and Timbuktu. From tribes torn asunder, you arrived square-toed and flat-footed, bewildered and bereft, stumbling and startled, looking over your shoulder with fingers crossed.
At Hampton you arrived as prisoners of war and as freed slaves, displaced and dislocated. Leaving your blankets and chains at the door, you checked in one way and came out another, but your missionary instruction would not be to conserve a legacy.
You arrived and acquiring the ways of the patriarch became your practice, assuming its name your fate, your progress now measured by your successful distance from your past. God and education posing as the perfect package deal, and your soul now the price of the ticket. Educated away from yourself, you gave up Ogun, Ife, Yemoja, Obatala, and Wakan alike for an alien god, a singular god. Ashe floating by on a red cloud.
Alpha, Omega, Delta, Psi, I saw you become Hampton alums, the graduates of a stripped people, echoes of your former selves, hollowed relics of a former time, but yet and still survival’s people. Still numb from the shock, I saw your dissipating fear and I watched you emerge.
I saw you Black and Indian commingle, building the structuring of your own survival brick by brick with your own hands and in your own time. From ash and dust and twilight I saw you clawing and rising inch by inch and side by side, and then sadly move along parallel lines.
I saw you challenging the institution and demanding more than reserved land, peanuts and twenty acres and a mule. Against the wind I saw your quest for more, and I saw you smile at the sweet smell of success.
Against all the odds I saw you become many things you were not supposed to be, and to my horror I saw some of you die trying. For those of you, for those of you whose remains remain here, the ancestors are weeping and calling out your names:
Medicine-Bull; Fire-Cloud; Banks; Kennedy; Mazakute; Tasunka-Wate; Savarpas; Bear-Bird; Mahpiya-Mani; Madison; Hipoya; Yellow-Hair; Rencontre; Bowed-Head Snow; Turner; Pratt; Noble; Blue-Pipe; Rios; Cracking-Wing; Red-Bird; Good-Road; Pretty-Hair.