Written by:
Crystal Carr
I ran toward the house and thought of my position. The voices echoed within my head like the sound of the famous whippoorwill. I had only one decision to make. Noticing my anger and confusion, I stood around the slave cabin to get a better understanding. “Will I get caught?” No. “Will he be mad?” Definitely. These were the challenges a black woman had to face in slavery. Thinking of the other perspective, I listened to my master’s voice, for he was nonetheless the symbol of White America, the only America that had been honored ever since it was founded.
“Should I join them?”
“Hate them.”
“What, master?”
“Hate them.”
“Hate them, hate them” is the sound proceeding from their lips, the same lips that told me to pick their cotton and work in their houses. The lips that told me that they were lovable but the hands that showed me the opposite. These hands beat me, brutalized me to scorn and treated me as an animal. These were the same hands that claimed they were out for my good but punished me for doing good. And now they tell me to hate them.
Well, I can’t. I’ve been hating all of my life, since they told me. I was a field negro, namely Aunt Jemima. I hated it as well as the mulattoes who were privileged to stay in the house. I hated the Natchez Indians before, when my master told me so. In my eyes we were crabs, and I refused to be at the bottom. But that is over now, no more useless hate. I have been touched by love, something greater than Master can ever give me, and that is freedom.
Oh, and you tellin’ me to hate them? Hate the very people that freed my family? Hate those that are helping me to accomplish freedom? Hate those who have suffered from your slavery and your constant brainwash of hatred?
No, I do not hate them, the Indian tribes sitting in swamps.
“Look what they did to you,” you say. But you did it to me when you paid them to beat us and talked us into beating them.
“You just can’t trust them,” you say. I can’t trust you, because I have now seen the truth. Blacks and Indians both at odds because of your foolish mind games. But this is not so now.
I am going to be free. I am going to be loved. And now as I suit up to join them in the battle of freedom, I will not hate them but destroy the hatred in you. And as we walk together fully armored in the Battlefield of Louisiana and shout, “On to New Orleans,” everyone will know that in 1811 the Blacks and the Indians found common ground. Together, we and the Indians must revolt and take hold of freedom.