Page 91 - 1619 Project Curriculum
P. 91

August 18, 2019

 historic speech at the Moscone Center                              ⬤ August 2005:         After Hurricane Katrina,

 for a ‘rainbow    coalition.’ Jackson, a Baptist                   30,000 evacuees, most of them black,



 ndidate for president at the time, would                           take refuge in the Louisiana Superdome.

 ndale.                                                             The chaotic, desperate scene that
                                                                    unfolded there would become a symbol


                                                                    of the city’s rampant racial inequality.















                                                                      A helicopter hovers overhead like a black cloud of smoke,
                                                                      its blades dismembering the pewter sky. Men in uniform
                                                                      stand outside with guns nested under their arms & the hot,



                                                                      wet air of   August licking their weary faces. Two women


                                                                      push a homemade raft through warm, brown   water that rises

                                                                      up & hugs their   chests. There is an old man inside the raft
                                                                      who   was once a stranger to them, when such a word meant

                                                                      something other than please help me. Inside, children are running
                                                                      across the emerald turf jumping through rings of light that
                                                                      spill from the sky onto the field. Their   small bodies sprinting




                                                                      between the archipelago of sprawled cots.   There is a mother
                                                                      who sits high in the seats of the stadium rocking her baby
                                                                      back   & forth, her voice cocooning the child in a shell of song.

                                                                      Before desperation descended under the rounded roof, before
                                                                      the stench swept across the air like a heavy fog, before the
            When   we walked out of the Barnett house, a house we were building,
          in a
               white neighborhood where none of us would ever be allowed to live,
             I watched Dafinas and Rae hug for eight seconds.          lights went out & the buses arrived, before the cameras came

                                                                      inside & showed the failure of an indifferent nation, there   were



            On the   way home, I asked Rae why she seemed so sad. ‘‘Rainbows,




          they’re pretty, but they   ain’t real,’’ she said. ‘‘Only thing real down here     families inside though there   were some who failed to call them



          is suff  ering. And work. And love.’’







               I told Rae that I liked her more than apple Now and Laters. But if     families. There   were children inside though there were some who



          believing in rainbows makes us love better, then rainbows can be just as   gave them a more callous name.   There were people inside though



                                                                      there   were some who only saw a parade of disembodied shadows.


          real as   work. And love. And if we really believed, we might be able to bring



          Dafinas’s granny back.   And one day, instead of building houses for white


          folks, in   neighborhoods we could never even visit if we weren’t working







          there,   we could maybe build beautiful houses with gardens where all our


          grannies could sit on porches, and safely tell lies that sound true.
            ‘‘I never   seen a black-and-brown rainbow,’’ Rae said, ‘‘but I’ll always



          believe in us.’’
            ‘‘I’ll be sad   when you go to college,’’ I told her. ‘‘But mostly, I’ll be fine,






          because I can’t stop believing that rainbows are real.   And the land and

          the black   and brown folks under those rainbows, we will one day be free.’’






                                                                                 Smith
           y Kiese Laymon                                           By Clint
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