My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 47

A-Legba Poetics:
Reading Komunyakaa

By

ARACELIS GIRMAY

* NOTE: the five collages in the piece are original works inspired by Komunyakaa’s poetry, prose, and interviews, with
the exception of the first, which takes its title from George Moses Horton’s “George Moses Horton, Myself.” Each collage
incorporates a Verdana font “+” which means to respond to the idea of the crossroads.

+
He enjoyed composing rhyming poems,
and would compose poems in his head
even before he knew how to write.
The students to whom he sold produce
came to know that Horton enjoyed
composing acrostics and love poems,
and somewhere in his life of selling
produce for the Horton plantation and
composing poems, he began to sell his
spoken love poems for change. And he
began to devise a plan.

My genius from a boy/ has fluttered like a bird within my heart…”
+

A few years ago, the poet Yusef Komunyakaa gave the
Helen Edison lecture at the University of California,
San Diego, and early on in his talk he spoke about the
poet George Moses Horton. A poet new to me.

46

A poet new to me. A poet I should have,
but had never, heard of before. A poet
whose story is extraordinary in many
ways, not the least of which deals with
freedom and urgency. Let’s begin there.

George Moses Horton was born into
slavery on the William Horton
plantation in Northampton County,
North Carolina, around 1797.
One of his “duties” (how language
sometimes fails to get at the daily
terrors of slavery) on the plantation
was to sell produce to students at
the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill. As a young man, Horton
taught himself to read using a spelling
book, a hymnal, and the Bible.

I do not know the details of that first
transaction, but I imagine that the
gleam of that first cent must have meant
something significant. What could
economic autonomy possibly have
meant to Horton? What did earnings
mean to a man who was deemed to be
the property of another man? Something
brilliantly, bravely hopeful must have
boiled up in him as he stood on the cusp
of his extraordinary liberation plan.
He imagined that with this change, he
would buy his own freedom. He would
write in order to buy his freedom.
Also extraordinary is the fact that
Horton eventually became a published
poet despite the fact that in 1831, under
the General Assembly of the State of
North Carolina (his state), it was ruled
illegal for anyone to teach “slaves”
and fellow “slaves” to read or write,
the use of figures excepted. And so
we understand that for George Moses
Horton to learn to read, to learn to
write, to begin selling memorized
poetry compositions so that he might
buy his own freedom was as much an
act of great courage and commitment
as it was one of the most profound
articulations of self worth, and hope.