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For My People Margaret Walker & David Walker & Jr Walker & Walker Smith Sweet Ray Leonard Rockin in Rhythm w/ Musical Dukes, What is this tradition Basied on, we Blue Black Wards strugglin against a Big White Fog, Africa people, our fingerprints are everywhere on you america, our fingerprints are everywhere, Cesaire told you that, our family strewn around the world has made more parts of that world blue and funky, cooler, flashier, hotter, afro-cuban james brownier a wide panafrican world Tho we are afro-americans, african americans let the geographic history of our flaming hatchet motion hot ax motion hammer & hatchet our cotton history our rum & indigo sugar cane history Yet, in a casual gesture, if its talk you want, we can say Cesaire, Damas, Depestre, Romain, Guillen You want Shaka, Askia, (& Roland Snellings too) Mandingo, Nzinga, you want us to drop Cleopatra on you or Hannibal What are you masochists paper iron chemistry & smelting I aint even mentioned Toussaint or Dessaline or Robeson or Ngugi Hah, you bloody & dazed, screaming at me to stop yet, NO, hah, you think its over, tradition song, tradition poem, poem for us together, poem for arthur blythe who told us again, in the tradition in the tradition of life & dying in the tradition of those klanned & chained & lynched and shockleyed and naacped and ralph bunched hah, you rise a little I mention we also the tradition of amos and andy hypnotized selling us out vernons and hooks and other nigger crooks of gibsons and crouchs and other assorted louses of niggers that turn from gold to shit proving dialectics muhammad ali style But just as you rise up to gloat I scream COLTRANE! STEVIE WONDER! MALCOLM X! ALBERT AYLER THE BLACK ARTS! Shit & whistling out of my nkrumah, cabral, fanon, sweep - I cry Fletcher Henderson, Cane, What Did I Do To Be So Black & Blue, the most perfect couplet in the language, I scream Moon Indigo, Black Bolshevik, KoKo, Now's The Time, Ark of Bones, Lonely Woman, Ghosts, A Love Supreme, Walkin, Straight No Chaser, In The Tradition of life & dying centuries of beautiful women crying In the tradition of screamed ape music coon hollers shouts even more profound that its gorgeous sound In the tradition of all of us, in an unending everywhere at the same time line in motion forever like the hip chicago poet Amus Mor like the Art Ensemble like Miles' Venus DeMilo & Horace Silver reminding us & Art Blakey sending us messages Black Brown & Beige people & Pharoah old and new, Blood Brotherhoods all over the planet, land songs land poems land sculptures and paintings, land niggers want still want will get land in the tradition of all of us in the positive aspect all of our positive selves, cut zora neale & me & a buncha other folks in half. My brothers and sisters in the tradition. Vincent Smith & Biggers, Color mad dudes, Catlett & White Chas & Wm, BT, Overstreet & the 60's muralists. Jake Lawrence & Aaron Douglass & Ademola Babatunde Building More Stately Mansions We are the composers, racists, & gunbearers We are the artists Dont tell me shit about a tradition of deadness & capitulation
