This piece by Yusef Komunyakaa from our 22nd issue, published in the winter of ’94, speaks to the resilience of marginalized people in the U.S., specifically the Black descendants of enslaved peoples. From Broadway to Bowery, he weaves the tale of the child of a family of freed slaves in New York, with all the complications that that entails: he asks how much trauma the body and the family can hold, and how much of a blessing it continues to be to be alive, to “make it back.” Told in elegant, deceptively simple tercets, each line cuts up to the knife of the final stanza, a slow burner that rages to this day.
Five Points
Yusef Komunyakaa
I am that boy
sneaking around corners
of the old Brewery.
In this Fagin world
of have-nots, I haven't
seen the sun.
for a week. In our cellar
each breath's borrowed,
but we're lucky
because there's only seven
of us in a room. I heard
about a girl stabbed
to death for a penny
she begged, & her corpse
lay in a corner
at least five days
before someone buried her
beneath the floor.
Yes, I kiss the good book
each time I make it back.
My feet divine
and invisible path around
the rookeries—Canal Street,
Park Row, Broadway—
memories of that ship
rock in my body, still
driving the blood.
My father's the best
blacksmith in town,
but since emancipation
he can't touch an anvil
or forge. My mother
begs me not to go
into the night streets
for a half loaf of bread.
I am worth sixty
or seventy dollars
to gangs calling themselves
blackbirders, slinking
in the shadows to shanghai
a girl or boy like me
to sell down south.
I'm not afraid of the boat
on the East River,
as if the moon
in the boy's belly
pulled it there. Mother
wanted father to use
a knife on my spinal cord,
but I showed them I can
walk sideways.
