Remembrance PRAYER FOR LIBATION AT THE GROUNDBREAKING FOR THE FREEDMAN’S MEMORIAL, DALLAS, TEXAS

W e stand upon this ship of earth bound in love and fealty As you came in ships upon water lashed and outraged bound by greed to wood and filth, wrapped with fetid cloth that at home would have heralded the presence of the ancestors and now only signals an anonymous death.



We salute you, our mothers and our fathers, for we know our history, the gangs of slaves chained with blood-smeared iron strangled in tattered cloth, gaunt with starvation, swaying in the hot Texas sun, stinking breaths of empty stomachs praying to the ancestors, to Allah, to Jesus for perseverance and endurance.



We know you, father and mother, heads rising strong in freedom finally come hard days of work and toil, breaking ground, scrubbing somebody else’s cloth, guiding your children, learning the alphabet once forbidden on pain of death, setting once again your own boundaries of personhood, of community lived in the light of day, not furtively in the shadows of the night and the overseer’s cabin.



We live again your rituals, grandfather and grandmother, and bear your names, hallowing this, our ancestral ground, where we have the right to bury our dead.



Here again is Africa, here again we take shell signaling the cosmic order. Here we pour water upon earth collapsing the boundary between this world and its mirror world where you dwell as our ancestors. We have new overseers, the bitterness and greed of our hearts, the despairs we let into our days.



Let us remember you. who endured what is unspeakable and who nurture us now from the other side. Come to us now, guide us now, fill our hearts with love of self and for one another. We embrace you, great-grandfather and great-grandmother. We do not forget you, we will never forget you.



Let this water fall upon the earth, come back to us, and come forth. Embrace us, sustain us, and guide us to love, endurance, and community now and forever.