For Bro. Terry
I did not know you.
Yet I did.
You could be my cousin, my uncle, my brother.
Child of the Motherland.
Just like me.
There are secrets known only to the children of the Motherland.
Secrets that none but us know no matter how they study and do research.
They listen to our music and watch us dance but know not the pain and the raw joy behind these songs and dances of ours.
They listen to and try to copy our speech but will never get down the cadence and the naturalness.
They want our talent, talk and swag but they don’t want us.
They said you had a gun. This is no crime.
A child of the Motherland in this nation of lynchers, thieves and wickedness must be armed to live.
We are a captured people, our birthright is being stolen as we speak.
From where comes power and liberation? The barrel of a gun.
He saw you. He hated you. He envied you. He took your life because he knew what you represented.
He represents decay and death. His is the voice of massa right before Nat Turner lopped off his head.
His is the voice of a thousand demons in the presence of Black Christ.
His is the shuffling walk of a filthy pig wallowing in and enjoying the scent of his own shit.
His is the stink of corruption and the greedy eye of the thief and the rapist of our ancestors.
Yours is the voice of Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King, the rage of Malcolm
the thundering justice hammer of Nat Turner,
the strut of Michael Jackson
the genius of millennia old cultures from Ethiopia to Egypt to Nubia to Zimbabwe to Nigeria.
He thought to steal you from us.
Yet we never forget. When judges and cops and prosecuting attorneys dangle from lampposts
One leech’s neck will be adorned by a sign.
This sign will read:
Terry Tillman m. 8/31/19
People’s justice served.
