The Mystery Man in the Black Hat Speaks

I am the spirit of the dead African man lost in the Atlantic during storms and murders crossing those terrible waters during the Middle Passage. My spirit though mixed in a mélange with blood of Cherokees and the spirits of Tom Ridge Tom Ross the Apache warrior Geronimo the Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh and his younger brother Tenskwatawa the one-eyed prophet and a whole lot of others. I rise up out of the ground out of the rivers walk and cut through mist fog tornado clouds hurricane winds come out of the ground from cracks of earthquakes the flaming lava of volcanoes and come here to this Mississippi River not far from Cahokia where the ancestors came upriver from the gulf and built those pyramids there to spite the white man. So I double/cross through the upside-down question mark of this here shining steel arch down here on the levy of Sad Louis and emerge from behind the polished steel and come out to greet you here to bring you a message but I can see you ain't ready yet so eye done changed my mind and I'm gon' walk back through the roiling rolling fog and mist until you ready to talk to me righteously because I am the voodoo spirit of African Indian double-take of cross-fertilization here in this cruel conflicted place called America. I am the double-back winding swamp snake who can cure these tortured spirits living here in this hellfire & brimstone place if only they will listen to me tell them the righteous truth. But until then I will come and go as I please as I want to sliding through the night with my mojo bone and juba shaking feather and appear whenever and wherever it suits me in my black hat and black cape sometimes riding a black horse and carrying a black whip that is my tongue that cracks and slips through the language we speak like a black mamba snake I move fast as an out-of-control brushfire strike deadly quick as a drone's exploding missile and then I'm gone just like that in the blinking flash of an eye.
Copyright Credit: Quincy Troupe, "The Mystery Man in the Black Hat Speaks" from Errançities. Copyright © 2012 by Quincy Troupe.  Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org.
Source: Errançities (Coffee House Press, 2012)