The Leesburg Stockade Girls

The Leesburg Stockade Girls

…or with great struggle in shrieks, biting
shouting and any other way little Black girls find the height
to fight God — well, white Jesus and his many, many cattle crooks.

There is no capitulation for Black girls who don’t want to stay in the world
as it is designed.
Just ask their Black daddies, who can’t convince them to submit to

perfect, pretty, pressed Sunday dresses
that always end up stained with hopscotch
and double dutch dirty fingernails

used to finger paint their names into the stockade walls
with their sweat and angel-wing water runoff.
There were 15 girls.

Or 400.
In all of their ranks —kidnapped and abused —
they subsumed the spirits of defected Union Soldiers
from the fingerprints in the bars.

Soldiers who were praying for death and boyhood,

They subsumed the gold from the teeth of
their captors and blessed it proper into incantations
to keep one another warm
in the Georgia rain that

carried their sister-auntie cousin’s fugitive humming,
to the cinder in the corner of the cell
where the girls made a fire with their training bras.
They rubbed on any surface
to christen the air, “momma’s bonnet”
to keep themselves covered in the blood.

The girls used the leftover meal snuck between
the gaps of their comrades’ baby teeth —
the littlest of them whom the guards took a liking to

with their unwelcomed kindness and perverted nostril hairs.
The girls used the leftover meal as an altar
to astral project to Papa’s dinner table come dusk.

They danced like holy ghost
and dug deep into the walls,
not to escape but to leave enough

of their dreams so that the prison might remember itself
a little room
fit only for princesses and gravestones of middle school crushes.

The 15.
The 400.
Maybe.

Unnamed,
but no more.
The girls salted every entryway into hell,

keeping the enemy out
with the odor of homemade hair product
and first menstruation.

They sealed away that entombed grief
of dumbass white boys killing on each other,
with love poured heavy
protecting the privacy of
strangers made sisters
made political prisoners
of
Black girls
who wanted nothing more

than to see a picture show
with Dean Martin,
Geraldine Page and Yvette Mimieux.

Only then to be summoned by the prison to possess it back
to Godliness
in how only children

can make
Heaven
of a hole.

In the Summer of 1963, 15 Black girls were kidnapped by Georgia police for protesting segregation laws at the Martin Theater. They were thrown into the Leesburg Stockade, a Civil War-era structure, for 45 days without their loved ones having any knowledge of their whereabouts. It is assumed that the Leesburg Stockade was a location where more than 400 Black girls were kidnapped and held throughout the twentieth century.

This poem is dedicated to the love that must have been present for those children to have made it through such harrowing conditions.