Ballad of Henrietta King
What happened?
Eight-year-old (or nine-year-old) Henrietta
King whose job it was to empty chamber
pots. Always the job of the lowest caste—
Dalits, burakumins, or here as (was Henrietta)—slaves.
Eight-year-old (or nine-year-old) Henrietta
does it here or rather there.
Yes, here it is done by little Henrietta
King, a slave. Hungry half-starved worked hard.
The Missus put out a piece of candy to see
if she will steal. For weeks Henrietta
resists the bait until the day she doesn’t.
Maybe she thinks the Missus forgot about it.
This is the turning point—a rabid bobcat
at a cotillion ball—white rage in lace.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers historian describes
it thus: the mother and her daughter (the Missus
and daughter are of whom I speak). The slave child.
Little Henrietta King probably does not know where
her mother is—collateral damage sold, tossed somewhere
like the contents of the chamber pot?
“No need to lie! Nobody but you stole that piece of candy.
Say so! Say so—child you are a thief!
As good as we were to you!
You could have been out in the field sunup
to sundown and then some! But you are here
in the big house and you steal!”
Mistress did begin to whip.
Oh, whip me she did! And I just would NOT
stay still and be whipped!
I just would run & squirm & flinch & duck
from the blows.
So, what happens next is Hiroshima or Auschwitz
except in scale. Except I was one not thousands,
except that I was not erased but effaced.
Mistress grabbed me by the legs and pinned my
head under the rocking chair.
Little Missy whipped my legs—
Little Missy did whip and did whip
while Big Mistress rocked back and forth over my
head in her rocking chair.
Her chair of ease and fanning and toddies
and crocheting and teacakes cracking my face,
crushing the bones in the left side of King’s,
Henrietta King’s, jaw. I could not open
my mouth, the left side avalanched constant-
ly to the side.
When children saw me they laughed or cried—
Elephant Man, or the rage-acid disfigured in Pakistan.
But this is here, way back then.
Not the radiation-mauled women of Hiroshima
flown here to the United States. This is an-
other here: “I was gib away.”
Everything was hard, she said: talking, eating—
thrown down I was taken, but he did not try to kiss me.
People look and wonder, “what debbil got
in an’ made me born dis way.”
It too troublesome to talk, most time, to tell ’em
I wasn’t yet ten and wanted something sweet
when what piece of childhood I had was crushed.
