Understanding MLK’s Legacy and America’s Complicated Past

Posted on January 19, 2025 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

My first “political memory” is the assassination of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. when I was 7 years of age. I did not know exactly what had happened, and why this “good man” was assassinated, but I knew that the world had moved and shifted like tectonic plates during an earthquake, and that the aftershocks would be cataclysmic if not apocalyptic. That day, I remember the sad and somber mood of the adults, like they had lost a relative and, in a sense, they had, a brother, a father, a Native Southern Son. I remember their refrain: “They [later I would learn that ‘they’ were white folk] killed another good [Black] man.”

            On that day, when MLK Jr. was assassinated, I became a poet. I learned the value and power of refrains. Since then, I have returned to that fateful day, in my writings, in my mind, and in my life, trying to make sense of it, hearing that refrain repeatedly, “They killed another good man.”  My love of history was also born on that day.

            American history is like a William Faulkner novel, complicated and convoluted, like The Sound and the Fury, with various points of view, with no true source of truth, only points of view. For example, some white Southerners have, till this very day, called the American Civil War “the War of Northern Aggression.”  The point of view of slavers and segregationists have dominated most of American history, from 1776 until 1968, and beyond.

            In today’s political conversations, we hear echoes of these points of view.

            MLK Day became a national holiday under President Reagan in 1983. During Reagan’s administration, lowly white bureaucrats in the White House “joked” and…

…called the King

Martin Lucifer Coon.”
These devils demonizing
The Late Prince of Peace,
Part of the backlash,
Against Reconstruction,
Against Civil Rights,
Against Affirmative Action,
Against Black Power

Angry white men
Rule world!

From my award-winning epic poem, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Shadows-Through-White-Looking/dp/1481722883

MLK Day was not recognized in all 50 states until 2000. Not surprisingly, a Southern State, South Carolina, was the last state to recognize MLK Day as a paid holiday for all state employees.

            Recently, just the other day, in thinking about this upcoming MLK Day, I returned to 1968. I already knew that that year was the most important year in my life. In thinking about 1968, I mused about what had happened. In my world, the most significant and traumatic event was the assassination of MLK. On that day, the Civil Rights Era abruptly ended. In 1968, RFK was also assassinated. And Richard Nixon became president of the United States of America.

            In musing about 1968, I did various Google searches. Not surprisingly, although this was the first time I had come across this idea, 1968 is considered the most traumatic year in American history.

            Samuel Yette, the first Black national correspondent at Newsweek, wrote The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America (1982). In the book, Yette describes the 1960s as the Decisive Decade. It was the decade that broke the fabric of America forever, that it was self-evident that she would not live up to her founding principles, that “all men are created equal, and are equal before the law.” Not even the election of President Barack Obama fixed this fatal broken thread in the patchwork quilt of America, which is still frayed.

            White Americans can talk about the “greatness” of America all they want, and not give Black folk any credit for America’s greatness, but if white folk, and all Americans, even those “crossing the borders” because they have heard the mythology America has propagated about her greatness throughout the land and they, too, want a piece of the American pie – if they want to understand the complicated and convoluted history of America, then they need only look at 1968, where the Great Society was upended by assassinations, and the inauguration of Richard Nixon as the 37th U.S. President.

            We know that the stars have not aligned for America when we remember MLK Jr on the same day that Trump is installed to occupy the Oval Office once again.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Growing Up, Lest We Forget, Martin Luther King, Politics, race, raising black boys, Relationships, Religion, Revolution, Streets of Rage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Sausage, Cabbage, and Black Bread

Posted on September 21, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

During my seven-hour flight to Frankfort, Germany, I watched “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”  Based on the book, Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII by Damien Lewis, the movie is a fictionalized version of “Operation Postmaster.” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill used a “black ops” team, “a motley crew of rogues and mavericks,” to neutralize Hitler’s fleet of German U-boats, which were not only constantly sinking supply and aid ships earmarked for the United Kingdom, but also resupplying the Nazi war effort.

I wasn’t on this plane!

One scene in particular struck me.  Two of the operatives, agents Marjorie Stewart and Richard Heron, are taking a train.  (In real life, Marjorie is a British actress and a member of the Special Operations Executive.  A Black man portrays Richard Heron.  The final destination is to the Spanish-controlled island Fernando Po.)  They are set to order dinner.  They discuss cuisine in the context of the major players in the war, the Germans, the British, and the French.  A Black male waiter is patiently waiting for them to order dinner.  If the Germans win the war, Marjorie says, then we’ll be eating sausage, cabbage, and black bread.  Marjorie then names some French cuisine, which is superior to German food.  Richard comments that if the British win the War, then it’ll be fish and chips.  They end up ordering sausage, cabbage, and black break.

Next year will be 80 years since V-Day, since the end of WWII.  Watching “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” conjured up many things.  Had the Nazis won WWII, I could very well be writing this blog in German while eating sausage, cabbage and black break. Had Hitler won WWII and established a 1000-year Reign, I am certain that there would not be any Black Nazis!

When we look at the Great Wars, there was a rising tide of nationalism.  (In America, in the last ten years, there’s been a rising tide of white nationalism, and white nationalists are hinting at a second American Civil War, though it’s framed as a Racial Holy War, or RAHOW.)  White nationalism is the twin brother of white supremacy.  It has given us pseudo-theories such as “manifest destiny” and “the white man’s burden,” though people of color have shouldered the burdens and the building of America as we know it.

With Oktoberfest right around the corner, I will revisit this issue over sausage, cabbage and black bread, and wash it down with das Bier.

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Rereading Richard Wright’s Black Boy

Posted on July 12, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

When I first read Richard Wright’s Black Boy more than 40 years ago when I was a teenager, little that I knew about literature,  I thought the writing was superb.  I was doing a little writing then and thought Wright was a good writer to study to learn the craft.  I aspired to be Wright reincarnated, since I was born a month before he died!  Of course, then I didn’t appreciate or understand that Wright’s story gave me a peek into the life of my father as a Black boy growing up in the segregated South a generation after Wright was born.

My father was a Native Southern Son.  He was born in North Carolina and as a teenager, because of conflict with his father, left home and moved to Virginia.  At 18 years of age, he was drafted into the segregated U.S. Army to serve during World War II.  A couple of years after his discharge from the Army in 1946, my father made his way up North to New York City, to the borough of Brooklyn.  My father probably left the South for the same reasons as Wright.  I don’t know.  My father never talked about growing up in the segregated South, at least not to his children.  In fact, although my father was always present in our lives until his death, I can’t recall him saying three consecutive sentences.  You could say that he was the strong silent type.  Today we would probably ascribe his silence to trauma, the trauma of being born and growing up in the segregated South 61 years after the supposed end of the Civil War, 49 years after the end of Reconstruction, when Jim Crow, the quintessential American racist terrorist, haunted the lives of Black folk with unspeakable violence.  Nonetheless, every year, around the Fourth of July, from the early 1960s until his death in 1982, my father would get in his Cadillac and head down South to visit his family.  He never took any of his children South.  I resented him for this.  I didn’t understand that this was his way to protect me.  But as a tween and a teen I didn’t know about the lynching of Emmett Till a few short years after my father left the South, a few short years before I was born.  My father probably had images of “Strange Fruit” dancing in his head if he even entertained bringing his headstrong first-born son South.  (I didn’t grow up with a fear of white people.)  I often wonder why my father left the South.  I imagine him in his Army uniform and being threatened by white men, probably called “boy” or “nigger.”  And how he had to act in the face of this.  As Wright describes his dealings with white men, how he had to fall “quickly into that nigger-being-a-good-natured-boy-in-the-presence-of-a-white-man-pattern.”  Wright’s descriptions of his and Black folk’s dealings with white folk is haunting.  He describes “the dark fears” he had known all his life navigating the segregated South.

As an adult, visiting and navigating the “New South” long after my father had died, I marveled at the temerity of white folk to memorialize and celebrate its “lost cause” with monuments and statues of Confederate Rebels, of men who had engaged in treason.  The descendants of these treasonous Confederates dared to attack Black American soldiers in uniform who had fought in two world wars to make the world safe for democracy and to end all wars!  On the other hand, in this New South, white people appeared to be different, unlike their parents and grandparents.  When I was in Nashville, TN for a week, more white people smiled at me and greeted me more so than white people in New York City in a year.  Perhaps the new lynching was to kill with kindness.  But I knew that that atavistic violence of white men towards Black people could be triggered at any moment, for an insult, real or imagined, especially towards their womenfolk.

Many lynchings of Black men was because of an accusation, real or imagined, of a Black man assaulting, even “sassing,” a white woman.  What was it about them that brought white men’s temperature to boil and explode in violence?  Today we speak of Karens, and we know that they know that they have the power to conjure up violence against Black men seemingly out of thin air.  What was it about white women?

I recall rifling through a drawer of my father’s.  I came across a box of bullets, and a gun.  I held the gun in my hand and felt its power, giving me the power to take life.  I quickly put it back, not wanting to be corrupted by its power.  That was the only time I held a gun. Was it even legal?  Why would my father need a gun?  Was he haunted by white men who had run him out of the South?  Did they populate his dreams, chasing him until they caught and lynched him and riddled his dead body with bullets?  Were their womenfolk succubae?  With a little more rifling through my father’s drawer, I came across a photo viewer.  I put it up to my eye and saw a naked white woman.  There wasn’t anything special or spectacular about her.  How could she incite and inspire such violence against Black men?  Was this why my father had fled the South?  Did he hold secret fantasies about white women?  Had he wrongly approached one and had signed his own death warrant?

*************

Before I left Nashville, I stopped at a gift store and the smiling white woman clerk wearing clinging daisy dukes and decked out in a sleeveless blouse with the Confederate flag tried to sell me a Confederate flag.  There were all kinds of Confederate paraphernalia in the store.  Had I walked back in time?  There ought to be a law against selling this crap. But this is what it means to live in a “free country.”  You can celebrate and flaunt treason.  Not everything was Confederate. There were salt and pepper shakers of stereotypical Sambo and Mamie.  At least they were not dressed in Confederate garb, just a slave slip for Mamie, and short pants overalls for Sambo, their oversized lips looking like they had collagen injections.  I shook my head and bought a set to give to a coworker.  Because I am a storyteller, and my coworker would think I made this story up, I had to have evidence of this find.  As I left the Confederate gift shop, the white woman seductively smiled at me, even though I hadn’t bought a Confederate flag.  My purchase of the Mamie and Sambo salt and pepper shakers were enough.  I hadn’t left the gift store emptyhanded.  It was then the insidiousness of it all struck me.  For some white people, Black people existed for their sport or entertainment.  And the coup de grace, lynchings, were not only public spectacles, but they were also festivals and orgies of hate.

Looking back on that day in the Confederate gift store, it was even harder for me to imagine how Wright and my father navigated their way out of the segregated South.

Posted in being a teenager, Black patriotism, crime, Family, Fatherhood, Fathers, Growing Up, raising black boys, Relationships, Slavery | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A Fourth of July Day Lynching

Posted on July 5, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

For Norris Dendy

07.04.1933

(Clinton, South Carolina)

To the Negro, what is the Fourth of July?

A picnic celebration with family and friends

Not a day to be beaten, not a day to die!

On this celebration of Independence,  still something to dread!

A picnic celebration with family and friends.

A Negro struck a white man, and thus he must die!

On this day of Independence,  still something to dread.

By the whims of white supremacy, all Negroes must abide!

A Negro struck a white man, and thus he must die;

Though not a day to be beaten, not a day to die.

By the whims of white supremacy, all Negros must abide.

To the Negro, what is the Fourth of July?

Posted in crime, ezwwaters, Family, Lest We Forget, Poetry, race | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

You’re Once, Twice, 34 Times a “Felon”

Posted on June 12, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Recently, in “The President’s Brief” from The Marshall Project, Carroll Bogert penned an op-ed piece in The Washington Post.  She wrote:

Since Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies last week, gleeful headlines have sprouted across the media, with a new descriptor for the former president: “felon.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/06/donald-trump-felon-media/?utm_source=TMP-Newsletter&utm_campaign=cee1aea830-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_06_11_03_36&utm_medium=email

“Donald Trump, Felon.” The New York Times

“Trump is a felon. Here’s why that should matter in the 2024 race.” The Washington Post

“Injustice: First Felon President.” New York Post

Ms. Bogert goes on about how the word felon had fallen into disuse, and that “the impetus behind the sudden widespread use of the word ‘felon’ is to take Trump down a peg, to label him as no better than a common criminal. And that is the problem.”

Years ago, that word (“felon”) was fraught with stigma, a stigma that stuck for a lifetime, but it mostly stuck to Black and Brown people, not the rare Great White Defendant.

More than 20 years ago, people impacted by the criminal legal system pushed back on the various stigmatizing terms inherent in the criminal legal system and advised the use of people first language.  Eddie Ellis, founder of the Center for Nuleadership on Urban Solutions and considered by many impacted by the criminal legal system the Dean of the Criminal Legal System and the Nontraditional Approach to the Criminal Legal System, wrote about people first language when talking or writing about people impacted by the criminal legal system.  Trump is no exception, in the sense of using people first language, despite his conviction on 34 felonies.

Note though to the President of The Marshall Project. People first language as it relates to people impacted by the criminal legal system was first uplifted by Eddie Ellis, and others who refused to wear those stigmatizing labels. Even if we concede that people first language was used by “disability” advocates, it was people impacted by the stigmatizing language of the criminal legal system that put this language on trial, and won, in that it made its way all the way up to the U.S. Attorney General’s office under President Obama. And the language changed at the top and had a trickle-down effect.

We’ve come a long way from copspeak. Let’s not let Trump derail something else.

In my next blog I’ll write about some writing projects in the mix.

Posted in crime, ezwwaters, Justice Chronicles, Politics, race, The New York Post | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Red Record Redux

Posted on May 30, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, in A Red Record (1895), about the bloody murders of Black people at the hands of white people, lists three “excuses” white people gave for the wholesale murder of Black people by whites.

The excuses are:

…the necessity of the white man to repress and stamp out alleged “race riots.”

In a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people,” the Negro’s vote became an important factor in all matters of state and national politics.  But this did not last long [1870-1877].  The southern white man would not consider that the Negro had any right which a white man was bound to respect, and the idea of a republican form of government in the southern states grew into general contempt.  It was maintained that “This is a white man’s government,” and regardless of numbers the white man should rule.  “No Negro domination” became the new legend on the sanguinary banner of the sunny South, and under it rode the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, and the lawless mobs, which for any cause chose to murder one man or a dozen as suited their purpose best.

Negroes had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon [white] women.

The Rape of the Negro Girl, by Christiaen van Couwenbergh

Most crimes, including rape, are intra-racial.  Nearly all of the miscegenation that happened in America was the rape of Black women by white men.  “The Rape of the Negro Girl” by Christiaen van Couwenbergh captures the unadulterated lust in the eyes of three white men as they assault (rape)  a Black female.  This painting is not based on a fantasy, but on the evidence, the progeny of miscegenation (the rape of Black women by white men).

As Wells-Barnett outlines in A Red Record, white people came up with one excuse or another to rationalize their violence against Black people.  The “rape excuse” is the most enduring one, till this very day. Wells-Barnett points out that during the Civil War, when white men went off to war, there are no documented cases of Black men raping their “unprotected” white women.

Nonetheless, because we are in a political season that some people believe will be the test of the resiliency of American democracy, it is worth revisiting Excuse Number 2, how when Black men in America first got the vote in 1870 with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, political violence began and was unabated for nearly 100 years.  (Think of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.)  The political violence continued with the January 6th Insurrection, and Trump and his coconspirators, including Rudy Giuliani, the man once erroneously dubbed “America’s Mayor,” targeted two Black women election workers in Georgia in what they (thieves) framed as “Stop the Steal.”

For those who think voting does not matter, then read A Red Record.  Wells-Barnett continues:

It was a long, gory campaign; the blood chills and the heart almost loses faith in Christianity when one thinks of Yazoo, Hamburg, Edgefield, Copiah, and the countless massacres of defenseless Negroes, whose only crime was the attempt to exercise their right to vote.

But it was a bootless strife for colored people.  The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable [unwilling] to protect him.  It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right.  Scourged from his home; hunted through the swamps; hung by midnight raiders, and openly murdered in the light of day, the Negro clung to his right of franchise with a heroism which would have wrung admiration from the hearts of savages.  He believed that in that small white ballot there was a subtle something which stood for manhood as well as citizenship, and thousands of brave black men went to their graves, exemplifying the one by dying for the other.

The white man’s victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation, and murder.  The franchise vouchsafed to the Negro grew to be a “barren ideality, “and regardless of numbers, the colored people found themselves voiceless in the councils of those whose duty it was to rule.

Voting mattered in 1895 and matters even more in 2024, where the presumptive Republican candidate is under indictment in many states, a Republican candidate that proudly muses out loud that he’s been indicted more times than the Roarin’ 20s gangster, Al Capone, and says that a fictional serial killer, Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter, is a “great” man.

I wish I were making this stuff of!  This is not American Fiction.  This s the real deal, where history is written in blood, and thus a Red Record.

In my next blog I will continue this theme, and the writing of poetry based on the Equal Justice Initiative’s “A History of Racial Injustice.

Posted in crime, ezwwaters, Lest We Forget, Martin Luther King, Politics, race, raising black boys, Relationships, Revolution, Slavery, Streets of Rage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Red Record

Posted on May 27, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

In my last blog I indicated that in the next one I would write something about crime and punishment.  For more than half my life, I have written extensively on the subject, in letters to editors, editorials, essays, and anthologies.  In fact, I am working on collecting this work into a collection, tentatively entitled, “No Rights that Are Bound to Be Respected,” which speaks to the white supremacist thinking outlined in the United States Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott (1857).  My most recent piece is in the textbook:

As a writer, inspiration comes from many sources.  Each day I read and post on my social media accounts the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) “ History of Racial Injustice,” which mostly documents, though not exclusively, the stories of “Black victims of racial terror,” and other people of color.

For a couple of years I have been reading “A History of Racial Injustice,” yet just the other day I was struck by how I should write a collection of poetry on EJI’s stories of “Black victims of racial terror.”

More than twenty years ago, I started writing poems on cases of law enforcement misconduct that was reported in the news.  I didn’t set out to write a collection, but after a little more than a year I had enough poems on law enforcement misconduct to put in a collection.  This was long before #BlackLivesMatter and law enforcement’s response, #BlueLivesMatter.  Of course, their lives matter, but not as a counterpoint to Black lives or as propaganda to detract from some officers’ misconduct.  Many of the “cases” that ended up in my collection, there seemed to be a better way to resolve than with deadly force.  I understand how tough a job it is being a police officer.  I know I couldn’t be a police officer, because I would end up in a similar collection to Sometimes Blue Knights Wear Black Hats, which was a National Poetry Series Finalist.

Since we are entering a political season, there will be much ado about law and order and crime and punishment, a tried but tired method of politicians, both Dems and Republicans, as their bona fides of “toughness.”  It’s easy to talk tough when other people, specifically police officers, are putting in the work as well as putting their lives on the line. Political mantras mean nothing when heroes are dead and or they make a deadly “mistake” and there is a civilian casualty.  To add insult to injury, law enforcement almost never owns up to questionable killings of civilians, and thus the creation of #BlackLivesMatter,

Crime and punishment should not be a partisan issue, but in an historically separate and unequal nation, most glaring in the criminal legal system, Lady Justice is seen as wielding her sword against people of color, striking them down without mercy.

In my next blog I will write about the process I am engaged in writing poetry that speaks to EJI’s history of racial terror.

Posted in ezwwaters, NYPD, police involved shooting, police-involved killing, Politics, race, raising black boys, Sometimes Blue Knights Wear Black Hats | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Neither Snow nor Rain nor Heat nor Gloom of Night Stays Hate Mail from Being Delivered

Posted on May 20, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Long before my first, award-winning book, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present, an epic poem on the captivity, exploitation and suffering of Black people in America, was published (2000), I knew I had arrived as a writer because I had received my first piece of hate mail in response to a guest editorial in Newsday, the daily paper of Long Island, NY.

ENDLESS PUNISHMENT IS A CRIME

My guest editorial in Newsday was about the quality of mercy. Gov. Mario Cuomo, dubbed Hamlet on the Hudson, on New Year’s Eve in 1985, granted executive clemency to Gary McGivern. Granted, McGivern was an unlikely candidate for executive clemency, which has been described as an “extraordinary form of relief.” Most New York governors have been extremely parsimonious in granting executive clemency to people convicted of crimes of violence, going back to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who granted such clemencies more so than all his successors to the current governor, Kathy Hochul.

Gary McGivern was serving time in prison when he, and two others, allegedly attempted to escape from custody when they were being transported. During the attempted escape, according to the theory of the crime the prosecutor put forward, McGivern and the two others killed a deputy sheriff. (One of the two others, Robert Bowerman, with McGivern was also killed during the attempted escape.) McGivern’s defense, as well as Chuck Culhane, offered that it was the other individual who attempted to escape, not them. Nonetheless, McGivern and Culhane were convicted of felony-murder and sentenced to death. They successfully challenged the sentence of death and were sentenced to 25 years to life. Throughout, McGivern maintained his innocence.

In commuting McGivern’s sentence through executive clemency, Gov. Mario Cuomo was not suggesting that he believed that McGivern was innocent, but that taking everything as a whole, including McGivern’s rehabilitational efforts, that an appearance before a parole board was in order to determine McGivern’s “parole readiness.” McGivern would appear before a parole board panel, and it would make a determination whether he should be released to parole supervision. Granting McGivern clemency was politically risky, and the talk in the prison yard was that there were worthier candidates for clemency than McGivern. In some ways, Gov. Mario Cuomo exercised political courage in being clement in this particular case, though there were hundreds if not thousands of other people in prison with more compelling cases than McGivern. My guest editorial in Newsday spoke to Mario Cuomo’s political courage and the quality of mercy as articulated by Shakespeare’s Portia in The Merchant of Venice.

About two weeks after my guest editorial was published in Newsday, I received my first piece of hate mail, from Hicksville, NY. The hater quickly devolved into an ad hominem attack, stating that he was sick of my “kind,” and that it did not matter what my race was. Note that my guest editorial was about the quality of mercy, and race did not enter the equation. For the record, a white governor granted executive clemency to a white person who had been found guilty of killing a white deputy sheriff! Of course, in matters of crime and punishment, race seems to find its way into the equation, even when it’s not part of the formula. The Hickvillian assumed that I was Black.

Photo Credit: Saskia Keeley

Writers who choose to put skin in the game have toughened themselves against ad hominem attacks. When we are personally attacked as opposed to the ideas we put out to the public, then we know we have touched a nerve of raw truth.

Truth be told, haters don’t deter me. It would be a stretch to state that haters inspire me. Nonetheless, I continued to write even more editorials and letters to editors on crime and punishment, because it is a subject that not only touches raw nerves, but also the subject where truth is most wanting.

In my next blog I’ll write about crime & punishment.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Writing Life: Writing An Award-Winning Epic Poem

Posted on May 13, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

My epic poem, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present, was a co-winner of the 1998 Edwin Mellen Poetry Prize for an epic poem on the theme, “the captivity, exploitation, and suffering of Black people in America.”  I added, and their “triumph,” for the Black experience in America is more than a tale of woe.

When the contest was announced, as a poet and a history buff, I knew I could write something compelling on the subject.  I knew I could win this contest.  In fact, I was so sure of wining the contest that I stated to myself, albeit without much conviction, that I would retire pen and paper and give up the writing life if I didn’t win.  To understand the import of this, at this stage of my writing career, I was considered by my peers and even my enemies as a writer.  In fact, I could not imagine breathing without writing.  I reframed Rene Descartes’ famous statement to: “I write; therefore, I am.”  I was nothing, I was not alive, without my identify as a writer.

I would write this award-winning book!

Before beginning my epic poem, I made a list of all the “Black history” books that influenced my thoughts and understanding of Black history, including all of the works of J.A. Rogers, to name a few World’s Great Men and Women of Color, the three-volume set of Sex & Race, and Africa’s Gifts to America, Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, and the book would be anchored by the thought of W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote about the gifts Africans and their descendants in the so-called New World gave to America: the gift of sweat and brawn; the gift of story and song; and the gift of the spirit.  These “gifts” would serve as a counterpoint to the “woes” that were articulated as the subject of the epic in the contest announcement.

Even though this was an epic poem, I began with the ending in mind.  I knew that I would have passages where Black folk, past and present, would lift up their Voice.  Thus, the ending would move towards the hopeful lines in the Negro National Anthem:

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us…

— Lift Every Voice and Sing

And since the story begins, based on the theme, in some ways, in America, the beginning of the epic would be framed Constitution-like, with a Preamble.  In writing the book, I sketched out sections, or “books,” for the epic, since there was no “unity” in the strict Aristotelian sense; and many poems I wanted to be able to stand on their own.  Ironically, my epic was not informed by the greatest epics in Western literature, The Iliad and The Odyssey, though there are parallels in Greek tragedy with the Black saga in America, the ongoing wars with periods of uneasy truces, exemplified in the Civil War and ending with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise (1877).

(Swing low, sweet chariot,

Coming for to carry me home,

Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home.)

— Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

 Additionally, I needed to address an ongoing problem with American history, that is, the whitewashing and sanitized version of it written by white historians. (America likes to think of herself as “great,” and in many ways she is, but the treatment of Black folk for hundreds of years wreaks havoc on the narrative in history books, which has a mythological quality).  Thus the title of my epic, the distortion of American history through a self-serving looking glass that distorts.  Think The Picture of Dorian Gray; its public-facing picture is beautiful, though its doppelganger in the attic, distorted by the whips and scorns of time, is the real face, hidden away from the world. The world has been treated to American mythology posing as history. American streets are not paved with gold.  In each cobblestone there is the blood, sweat, and tears of Black folk.  And this we need to remember.  This history should not be relegated to the Shadows!

In my next blog I’ll discuss knowing that I was a writer when I got my first piece of hate mail.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Lest We Forget, Politics, race, Slavery | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Streets of Rage Redux

Posted on May 2, 2024 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

When my childhood friend, Isa Rock, read and reviewed my novel, Streets of Rage, he wanted more.  A few mornings ago, I started to think about more, and thus the process began in my head.  My process as a writer of fiction begins with the end in mind.  Where is the final destination I want to take the reader?  Then I work on the beginning.  If I can begin, with much thought and scribbling on whatever is at hand, a napkin, an envelope, a sheet of paper, then the process begins in dead earnest.

This is me teasing out the process for more: “There was something liberating about killing a white man.”

How’s that for an opening line?  Now maybe you’ll want to read Streets of Rage in preparation for the second act?

There was something liberating about killing a white man.

In this day and age, a writer simply doesn’t write; a writer also needs to help with marketing his or her work.  (I came up with the idea for the book covers for all four of my books and wrote information for the dust jacket.)  This is what would appear on the dust jacket for Streets of Rage Redux: “As a teenager, he got away with murder.  That murder changed his life.  Instead of going to prison, he went to college.  Forty years later, looking back, he tells his story after that fateful day when he became a god.”

Order Streets of Rage

In my next blog I’ll discuss the process of writing my award-winning epic poem, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present.

Posted in being a teenager, crime, ezwwaters, juveniles, Murder, Nation of Islam, raising black boys, Streets of Rage | Leave a comment