Unit 1: Selection Vocabulary 4

everything is a martyr, there—
we don’t dare live lest we die

I know what loss smells like from a mile far, the way friends
tell you they saw your house tear asunder
like it was never there

Still, some fear me, they call me names, they try to break
me, to wreck me, to ricochet me, but
my spine will keep mountains standing,
my knees will only ever kneel to my Lord

One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

And some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Six pounds and one ounce, lighter than my smallest dumbbell was my newborn niece, her face bright pink, her eyes tightly shut, her body coiled around itself in a fetal position, still defiantly resisting the world into which she’d just been thrust.

I had been awaiting her birth with feverish anticipation; I was going away for the summer, and I didn’t want to leave before she was born, only to come back eight weeks later and find that she had grown accustomed to most things in the world except her auntie on her father’s side, the sole woman child in a family of men, who all her life had dreamed of having a sister.

I had been awaiting her birth with feverish anticipation; I was going away for the summer, and I didn’t want to leave before she was born, only to come back eight weeks later and find that she had grown accustomed to most things in the world except her auntie on her father’s side, the sole woman child in a family of men, who all her life had dreamed of having a sister.

But I’d decided to wait until both my niece and nephew were born to share this with their parents—that we had each become a repozwa, the Haitian Creole term for “sacred place,” in whose shelter children would now seek rest.