Let Vindice Be Aided by Me - PART III

By Joan Hough

All should learn that in the cold of the North, the children of the Sun
sickened, moaned, groaned and died too frequently,
Were saved only when their care
became burdensome—too expensive
for their Northern Lords.

Then in came the whites—the Irish,
Enticed here by the Northern lords
they worked for mere pennies—penny, slave labor,
They paid for their food,
paid for their clothes, paid for the roof o’er their heads,
paid for the medicine they barely managed to get when sick in their beds.

Black gold, in the eyes of the Lords,
No longer needed, changed and became black dirt,
So, delightedly, the Lords dumped it all in the South.
By selling it, they dumped it—
When they could’ve let their black gold go.
They could‘ve set those black people free.

Instead, they convinced Southerners to buy that black gold.
So cotton could be harvested
And sent back up North to those same mighty Northern Lords,
Sent to be used in their factories
to make all that cloth to sew and to sell
and to pave the way of the fine Yankee Lords
away from Heaven, straight to hell.

Thanks to Eli Whitney, and slave ships of old,
Cotton, the South’s white gold,
Was harvested by the North’s black gold,
And sanctimonious Northerners
Quickly managed to forget their former role,
How they had dirtied their hearts and dirtied their hands
By stealing black people in far away lands.