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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.

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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.

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