Sublime

“I had much rather starve in England, a free woman than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.”

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded, and, as has often been noted, they were prophetic. But they were also only partly true. Certain crimes were ceased by the Civil War, but they have not been purged. Not yet. Harpers Ferry is

Annie Allen had won Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950.

The Clotilda arrived in Mobile Bay in July of 1860, fifty-two years after the slave trade was declared illegal. Slave traders broke the law by importing captured Black people, either from Africa or the Caribbean, and secretly depositing the cargo at hidden locations along the Gulf Coast. It was a lucrative game of cat and mouse. With the Clotilda,