Alamance Palimpsest
By Zachary Brett Charles
On fame’s eternal camping ground, their silent tears are spread, and glory guards, with solemn round, the bivouac of the dead. / 1861. C.S.A. 1865. – Inscription on the southern face of the confederate memorial outside the Alamance County courthouse in Graham, NC.
Today, black and white
compensatory F-250s drove
through campus. Parading flags with words
like, again, implying a return,
added to the vocabulary of oppression.
The hooting and hollering of
ignorance and hate given throats
echoes off Piedmont oaks.
The sound carries fragments of memory
through time (history echoes too). The whisper of Wyatt Outlaw
looks like his shadow might have, cast over court doors
with a crooked neck on a February morning in eighteen-seventy,
when the ku klux hanged him
and nailed a warning to his chest:
Beware, ye guilty, both black
and white.
The trees know there has been no
repentance. In front of the court,
where Outlaw hung, stands a Confederate
statue, dedicated in nineteen-fourteen. On the university street,
the memories reverberate as sound waves through red brick
where, in their trucks, the children drive by. The name
of one building, dedicated in nineteen-sixty-six,
is Long, after William S., the founder of the university.
His brother was Jacob A., one of
between sixty-three and seventy-five men,
who, in eighteen-seventy-three,
were indicted, thanks to Albion Tourgee,
for the murder of Wyatt Outlaw. They faced no
consequences when the democracy
passed a bill of ku klux amnesty.
The trees have heard these voices,
heard the colors of black necks
wrung, brown skin opened,
and blood as it runs
red. These are sounds that have scarred
this landscape. We hold
hands, my sister’s, black, mine, white.
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Zachary Brett Charles is a young, bisexual person currently living in Seattle, Washington with his partner and their cat, Frankie. He loves writing poetry, short stories, and small comic strips for his Dungeons and Dragons games as well as painting, drawing, and being outside. He worries constantly about the effect of Western capitalism on individuals, humanity as a whole, and the environment. He studied Spanish at Elon University and proudly turned down awards with Greek letters for academic achievement. Follow them on twitter @brettspoems.