La Amistad

"Give Us free!"
Inspired by the story of
the slave ship Amistad (Friendship)

There was a Mende man
Who threw a stone
And a lion fell.
He threw the stone
Because there was nothing else to do
The lion had to be stopped.

He was afraid,
But he threw the stone
And by some miracle that lion
Fell to the brown African earth
And he saved his village.

His name was Sengbe.

Years later
He would be pulling a nail from the wet wood
Of a beam in the Amistad.
He would rise up
And overthrow his captors.

The man who killed a lion
With a stone
Was a slave purchased for $450.00
But he rose up from the dark holds of the Amistad
And reclaimed his life from his captors.

Sengbe took the Amistad
And set sail for Africa,
But ended up captured again
Put in chains and on trial.
And for two years
Fought in the American courts
For his freedom.

Time and again
He fought that lion with a stone.
From court to court, appeal after appeal
The lion came
And the village trembled
But Sengbe
Stood firm in that field
There in the sun
The lion's hungry eyes
Fixed on his own
The weight of that stone
In his hand.

At Hartford Connecticut, on November 19, 1839
In a US District Court
Sengbe faced America
And on January 13, 1840, Judge Judson
Ruled that Sengbe and his people had been kidnapped
And should be returned to their home in Africa.
During this time
The Amistad people learned the story
Of the great man who
Was always followed by the sun,
Who healed the sick
And held the children.

He too found a lion of repression
And slavery in the land
And killed it with the stone
That rolled away from his tomb
The day he rose from his death.

"Give us Free," Sengbe said
Holding his manacled hands up to the sun
That drifted in a smoky bar from a court room window.

"Give us free!"

Former president John Quincy Adams
Who co-defended them in the US Supreme Court said.
"What can I do for the cause of God and man,
For the progress of human emancipation,
For the suppression of the African slave-trade?
Yet my conscience presses me on;
Let me but die upon the breach."

On February 24th "Old Man Eloquent"
Reached into the heart of an African,
Heard his story,
And learned the secret of honoring who you are.
Calling on our "elders" like Jefferson and Washington
To show Spain that our courts were not the playthings of children
As they were in the land of the fourteen year old queen
Demanding her slaves
With the stamp of her tiny foot.

"Give us free!"

We are not free, if any part of this democracy
Is enslaved. We are not free, if all are not free.

"Give us free!"

If we can't grasp that simple fundamental of American tradition,
Then we have failed to grasp democracy.

We have lost the thread of our story
And have misunderstood the purpose
Of why we began as we did
And who we are now.

The Mende African
Told Adams that when we are afraid
When we are in trouble,
We must call on our ancestors
To bring us the wisdom we need
To solve the problem.

"We are here
Because they lived.
When we call them
They will always come,"
He said.

They must come.

In the court room
In a language he barely knew
The Mende African, Sengbe
Spoke to the very fundamentals of what this country rose from
And became, through strife, pain and tears.

In that court room
After the decision to free the Africans
When John Quincy Adams was asked by the man
Who threw the stone
That killed the lion
What he said to those sullen faces in those straight backed seats
Many of them slave owners.

Adams said,

"Your words."

By J.M.Lamoreux