MICHAEL NABORS
SATURDAY, JUNE 16, 2018
Calling All Fathers
From the Sheraton Convention Hotel
we made our way down King Drive
passing Beale Street as if it could talk
taking in the sights and sounds of Memphis
with its BB King Restaurant and Blues blaring
into the cobblestone streets
and Elvis impersonators hawking souvenirs while
shaking their hips and singing
about a hunk of burning love
we saw
yet another barbecue restaurant
Rounding the corner and getting out of the car in front of old fashioned sign
just as it had hung that April 4th day fifty years ago
an old woman sat under amake shift shelter
launching a tirade of protest remarks that included
“over 20 million dollars spent on renovating a hotel into a museum
for a man who tried to feed the hungry”
nevertheless we pressed on
having already paid our discounted ticket price
of ten dollars
the
Once inside we made our way into the atrium where
the deeply accented southern guide bid us a Happy Valentine’s Day
while telling us to be quiet until she was finished
We walked a path leading from the sun-Son filled coast of West Africa
to slave pens at Goree Island
to slave ships crossing the Atlantic
to auction blocks in
Richmond
Charleston
Savannah
some of us kept looking for God
We traveled to
tobacco plantations in Virginia
cotton plantations in Mississippi
sugar cane plantations in Louisiana
stepping through over 240 years in about ten minutes
and saw Divine grace
We eased our way through ten years of Reconstructionlike a
liquid thing pouring itself
on 4 million of our ancestors
defying every odd against
the hatred of a defeated Confederacy
turned into a maniacal monster and
a lack of formal education
along with no forty acres or mule
but on sheer human grit and divine grace
made of themselves the best this soil has produced
Traveling through a great migration of the ancestors
to a more promising land
we saw Chicago and The Defender
New York and Abyssinian Church
Detroit and the Assembly Line
the NAACP and CORE
SCLC and SNCC
Rosa
Malcolm
and then
Martin
young and powerful
filled with words and visions
born into the yesterday of segregation
but with tomorrow’s seeds of integration
falling from his pockets
we listened not just to the ardent power of his precise oratory
but to desperation in the pitch of his voice
calling for the urgency of now
as he had done for most of his
and then slowly and methodically
put on lotion
oiled his hair
brushed his teeth
went to the bathroom where he showered and shaved
he got out of bed
one last time
where Martin rose
that just ahead was the hotel room
knowing
and we stood in it
A line formed thenthirty nine years
he dressed
in a pressed white shirt and dapper tie
put on his pants and suit coat
stepping outside into the Memphis sun
and placing a hand on the balcony
of the Lorraine Hotel’s second floor
he shouted to someone his last earthly words
crushed his throat
and a bullet from hundreds of yards away
when the crack of a rifle broke through the atmosphere
he was preparing to go to dinner
“sing Precious Lord tonight”every thing in its path
and crumpling him
in the wink of an eye
just like that
he was gone severing
and we
I
have not recovered
these
50
years
later