THE BIRTH OF AMERICA

by Sally Zakariya

Above is the logo of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. The Project aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

Not 1492 when Columbus landed
not 1607 when settlers founded Jamestown
but 1619 when twenty-some Africans
arrived in chains

Port Comfort their landing place
proved no comfort for them

That’s when America began
land of freedom but not for them
land of plenty but not for them
land of everlasting shame
for us but not for them

Twelve million stolen from their homes
two million died on the Middle Passage
half a million sold into slavery here

They cleared the land and built
the plantation houses
they cleaned and cooked and toiled
to make white people rich

They picked cotton for my grandfather
a white-starched-collar lawyer
in Memphis who didn’t have to bend
his back or dirty his hands

They fought for this country
their country and ours
and now … and now …

Four hundred years is time
to admit our history
time to make things right

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is The Unknowable Mystery of Other People (Poetry Box, 2019). She is also the author of Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of the poetry anthology Joys of the Table.

STEVE KING: THIS IS YOUR NOT SO WONDERFUL LIFE

by Michael H. Brownstein

      King said. "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"
      Hayes asked: "Than white people?"
      "Than, than Western civilization itself," King said. "It's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization."

—USA Today, July 18, 2016

So Congressman Steve King of Iowa woke on Monday morning.
The first thing he did was go to the bathroom—outside in a small wooden shack. (1)
He wiped his behind when he was finished with leaves and other weeds. (2)
Then, like a dog, slapped water onto his face, dug his tongue into the pond and drank. (3)
In the house he put on a smock of leaves (4) after a cold snack of simple food. (5)
He walked to work (6) down crooked pathways to his office in a city without focus (7)
and entered a small office in the capitol of no pattern (7 again) —you get it now—
just about everything was designed or invented by someone who was not white.


1. A typical example is the Indus city of Lothal (c. 2350 BCE). In Lothal all houses had their own private toilet which was connected to a covered sewer network constructed of brickwork held together with a gypsum-based mortar that emptied either into the surrounding water bodies or alternatively into cesspits, the latter of which were regularly emptied and cleaned. (Khan, Saifullah. "Sanitation and wastewater technologies in Harappa/Indus valley civilization 2600-1900 BC")

2. 50 B.C. The Chinese first made paper with short lengths of bamboo and then later added cotton linen rags which were soaked in water and pounded into swollen pulp. This was then formed into sheets and dried.
105 A.D: Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese court official, has his name linked to the invention of paper. Most likely, Ts’ai mixed mulberry bark, hemp, and rags with water, mashed it into pulp, pressed out the liquid, and hung the thin mat to dry in the sun.
8th Century: Arabs were known to make writing paper and were the first to use linen in the process. (The Toilet Paper Encyclopedia)

3. Bamboo tubes sealed at the end with clay provided a usable container in Asia, while the inhabitants of the Tehuacan Valley began carving large stone bowls that were permanently set into a hearth as early as 7,000 BC. (Cookware and Bakeware at Wikipedia)

4. Cotton was used for clothing in Ancient India from 5th millennium BC. Linen cloth was made in Ancient Egypt from the Neolithic period. (History of Clothing)

5. The earliest evidence for fire associated with humans comes from Oldowan hominid sites in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya. The site of Koobi Fora (FxJj20, dated 1.6 million years ago) contained oxidized patches of earth to a depth of several centimeters, which some scholars interpret as evidence for fire control. At 1.4 million years of age, the Australopithecine site of Chesowanja in central Kenya also contained burned clay clasts in small areas. Other Lower Paleolithic sites in Africa that contain possible evidence for fire include Gadeb in Ethiopia (burned rock), and Swartkrans (270 burned bones out of a total of 60,000, dated 600,000-1 million years old), and Wonderwerk Cave (burned ash and bone fragments, ca. 1 million years ago), both in South Africa. (K. Kris Hirst, "The Discovery of Fire")

6. C.R. Patterson, born slave, built automobiles before Henry Ford. (Monette Bailey)

7. President Thomas Jefferson recommended Benjamin Banneker (an African-American) to be a part of a surveying team to lay out Washington, D.C. Appointed to the three-man team by President George Washington, Banneker wound up saving the project when the lead architect quit in a fury – taking all the plans with him. Using his meticulous memory, Banneker was able to recreate the plans. Furthermore Banneker invented a perfectly timed working clock. No wonder Steve King was never on time.


Michael H. Brownstein was the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam, 2011.