Empowerment Avenue Featured Author

Betrayed by Langston

Feed me sugar and spoiled milk
make me harvest out your crops,
listen to my plaintive songs
as I swing my sickle hot.

Send me out into your fields
in tattered clothes and chains,
even though I am not your slave
my work never seems to wain.

Congress and Lincoln said
that slavery must end,
the South has found a way around
to make the Constitution bend.

For as I serve my sentence
in the brutal Georgia heat,
the chain gangs are my punishment
and legal slavery.

As my tired eyes look around
I see men who resemble me,
not a woman nor a white man here
only colored boys like me.

A Negro man and woman
saw me on that road,
they looked me in the eye
never did they slow.

If I had been sitting in that car
the engine would have stopped,
a hello and a prayer sent up
no matter what the cost.

That is why I am here
too militant for them,
cannot be invisible
will never be their friend.

* This poem was inspired by the article "A Lost Work by Langston Hughes", in which he details his encounter with Georgia's chain gangs while traveling through the South with Zora Neale Hurston. He admits that while he wanted to stop and talk to the prisoners, he was too afraid of the white guards glaring down from their mounted posts. The first person voice is used to illuminate the potential betrayal felt by the prisoners, who would have seen Hughes and Hurston pass by in their car. I use the words "colored", "Negro" and "boy" only because those were the generally accepted terms at that time in 1927 when Hughes and Hurston traveled through Georgia together.