This poem is part of a special section of the Mid-Atlantic Review, Celebrating Black History, and selected by editors Khadijah Ali-Coleman, Carolivia Herron, and Rebecca Bishophall. To learn more about this series read a blog post on the Day Eight website here.
A note from the poet: On the night of July 17, 1944, black naval work gangs loaded bombs and live munitions onto two cargo ships at Port Chicago on the Sacramento River. At 10:18, explosions destroyed both vessels and the pier, killing 320 including all of the loaders. The black seamen who had been off-duty were ordered to clean up the decimated base, including their dead colleagues, and then resume loading operations downriver at Mare Island. 252 protested. When threatened with court-martial, 202 returned to work. 50 were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Their white officers were given 30 days hardship leave.
That Familiar Comfort
The river at Port Chicago
was pink in the dawn glare,
strangely like that night
they fled for their lives,
biplanes spotlit by burning buildings,
kerosene bombs bursting on the roofs,
clubs and rifles,
white boys and their fathers,
beasts hunting little Africa
for black runners.
Do you know this story,
the Tulsa pogrom of 1921,
six thousand black people jailed,
no whites, the Greenwood ghetto
burned to the ground,
no insurance ever paid,
no crime ever charged,
the dead uncounted.
I never knew it
till today; I bear that shame,
small price for my privilege.
From this day I forswear
that familiar comfort,
the cowardice of forgetting.
Don Krieger is a biomedical researcher whose focus is the electric activity within the brain. Don is author of the hybrid collections “Discovery” (Cyberwit, 2020) and “When Danger Is Past, Who Remembers?” (Milk and Cake Press, 2022), a 2020 Pushcart nominee, and a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science-as-Story Fellow. Don’s work has appeared in Seneca Review, The Asahi Shimbun, Beltway Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Tallahassee Democrat, American Journal of Nursing, Neurology, and others, and has been translated into Farsi, Greek, Italian, German, Turkish, Romanian, and Portuguese.
Featured image in this post: “Tulsa Race Riot, 1”, United States Library of Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
