Photo By Sarah Longe

Poetry By Gabrielle Wilkosz

I’m here if you wanna come see me.
On Martin Luther King Jr Blvd
All you’ve gotta do is turn
into the big white doors next to the bronze star and go
spiraling up the pebble blue stairway to heaven.

My name is Fred Hampton. I am 21 years old, born in Summit, Illinois.
But I don’t get to walk those streets much anymore.
The way Kerry made me, I’m forever in this bed right here,
Wearing the cold December night like some bath sheet
my arms aren’t long enough to reach over and pull off.

My fiancée lies here close.
the small grey lump in the bed facing the left wall.
My baby Deborah’s raven shoulders and mine are alike, weighed
down by strokes of black grey and the fight I’ve taken up.

But she and I are forever on our
tiptoes, elegant and posed.
Dancing on the edge of time.

Ghosts of Chicago Police and FBI are two soft minutes from busting into this room.
The placard says so.
Two soft minutes that don’t happen.
And the way I hang on this wall next to my baby,
I’ll be two soft minutes from hearing their steps.

The white men in uniform with thick belts and thick boot soles are frozen in time, still running figures. They wanna come for us because like a lot of people they just don’t understand what it is to be haunted by the rights you should have, but don’t.

There’s a difference between how Kerry made me, Deborah and these three walls
and what it was really like.
This time, even though the room is darker, people can finally see. You’ve seen the sandy desert stretch of glass to my right, a two way mirror where all sorts of people and their baggage gather.

They wait for the light to hit their eyes.
They wait for the dark to adjust.
Tiny molecules, dust particulates adrift.
The human lens stumbles into focus.
They see us.
See my baby Deborah.
They see me.
And when they walk away, they’re not the same for it.

In Kerry’s painted world, December ‘69, Deborah and our kid inside her are well.
Under the covers, they’re safe. She and her fiberglass bones go right on sleeping next to me.
And in the morning, Potential sits like a fat bird on the windowsill.
Still, I’ll go right to work with my brothers and my sisters
Shedding our scales every day and licking wounds and picking up the broken ones among us.

Some people have called me revolutionary.
How do you like that?
Revolutionary.
I want you to go and look through the right side and you see my bleeding heart and my broken bed,
you go and understand the brightest thing in that god damn room is the flag.
In a world that only sees white, you go and look.

You remember what you learned in the blackness.

Fred Hampton served as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the national Black Panther Party when he and his pregnant fiancé were wrongfully murdered by The Chicago Police and FBI in December 1969. Artist Kerry James Marshall depicts this important historical event from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in “Black Painting” currently on display at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.