Jaki Shelton Green's "The River Speaks of Thirst"

I don't have words to write about the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis -- only the latest in a long, long litany of killings of black people by American police, another piece of systemic violence done by a social system that has gutted essential community services at the same time it has remade our police as a military force, and an economy where oligarchs are allowed to amass billions while their corporations are sustained by people who struggle to cling to the barest subsistence. I watched the cities burn in the '60s from my mother's living room, I saw Rodney King beaten by LAPD on the TV in a bar, I sat in my living room with my wife and watched in mute horror as police fired teargas into a residential neighborhood in Ferguson, Missouri, and thought that surely, now this must change.

There is much pain and anger here, and the explosion of support for the value of black lives, with millions of people marching in the street across America and all over the world, may have brought us to a pivotal moment where our original sin must be atoned for and our tab must at long last be paid. The Covid-19 pandemic continues to highlight the weakness of our governance, the woeful inadequacy of our health care system, and the tenuousness of our prosperity. The big, diverse crowds now demanding justice give me more hope than I've had for several years. Here's hoping the momentum can continue.

I don't really have the attention span to write right now. The news cycle has me perpetually distracted; my sleep cycle is jacked. But here's something I wrote on social media a couple of weeks ago that I still stand behind today: "Someone who tells you an unpleasant truth about yourself is not your enemy. They're giving you the chance to be better. The people who are marching all over the country aren't a threat to this country. They're patriots, giving us the chance to do better at living up to those high words written by flawed men a couple hundred years ago. The alternative is a totalitarian nightmare. Time to choose."

And then this arrived like a healing balm in my email yesterday. It's a poem by North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green, a writer-educator-activist whose debut album The River Speaks of Thirst drops a couple of days from now, on Juneteenth. Written a few years ago for an online anthology, "Oh My Brother" is a song that's as old as the Middle Passage and as current as today's headlines -- for the killing of black people goes on unabated, by police in Atlanta and in a rash of lynchings that police call suicides.

Green's voice is suffused with the Southern rural experience of her growing up and the sounds she absorbed from her family's record player -- the Last Poets, Nina Simone, Arthur Prysock, Malcolm X. Her shattering evocations of pregnant mothers diving to their deaths in the ocean to escape slave ships, of the dynamic between the descendants of slaves and slaveholders, of trees that hold the memory of lynchings, are intoned carefully, in the manner of a shared confidence.

Producer Alec Ferrell has fashioned simple, unobtrusive backings to frame her words. Green is joined by collaborators here and there -- Jennifer Evans adding a gospel undercurrent to "This I Know for Sure," Durham poet-musician Shirlette Ammons reciting "A Litany for the Possessed," Chapel Hill poet laureate CJ Suitt declaiming "No Poetry," jazz singer Nnenna Freelon echoing her on the title track -- but it's Green's words that are the blood and bones and sinew of this record. Listen.