Each richly brown and languid-eyed patient I meet
evokes a tale, faithful or not? No matter to me.
Of reluctant heroes from a bygone era
of Jim Crow and a Civil Rights conflagration
They are children of strange fruit left dangling from limbs
straining the heart of the ironic live oak tree,
forgotten chattel, sustaining a feast for flies,
their gagged cries still haunting our restless sleep
Their limbs now curtailed by surgeon’s steel
As the sugar’s insidious scourge lays siege,
til there’s nothing but a cold memento, a stump,
reminder of a body once lithe and lean
Imagine: once his black-gloved fist thrust high
an anvil on a podium festooned with gold and bronze,
silencing Key’s Banner with a somber din;
pity, hailed for speed, not his glorious color
Entombed in a ward of malignant blight,
her crypt animated by the red devil poison
slyly coursing through sclerosing veins;
all-the-while waging a futile battle
Once this High Priestess of Soul mourned his plight.
as The King of Love was silenced in Memphis.
Take to the streets and unleash your fury;
civil disobedience vanquished: ‘Nuff Said!
The Reverend awaits His imminent embrace
as he is chained to a lifeless placenta;
arms riddled with old fistulas run dry
like obsolete gnarled tree roots
Down at the 16th Street Church you hear:
Nothing! His sermon muted this week.
“A Love That Forgives” was blown to bits,
leaving Birmingham afire with four slain girls
Nearly three score hence in a Charleston Church,
have we learned nothing? I fear so.
The blood of hate spilt across His altar
is a stark reminder of the chasm remaining
In life’s gloaming their faintly living remains,
in beds form a procession of caskets on wheels,
traverse hospital halls in an ironclad fate,
to the last sojourn, to be wrapped in pall
You diminishing scions of an effete era,
from a time of discontent and daily martyrs,
may peace finally grace you at day’s last light
as the torch is relit, the struggle bequeathed to sons and daughters
Education|
April 2017
Eulogy of the Scions of Jim Crow
Eric Hanson, M.D.
Eric Hanson, M.D.
From the Frye Regional Medical Center, Hickory, North Carolina; and Mission Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina. ewhanson12@gmail.com
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Carol Wiley Cassella, M.D., served as Handling Editor for this submission.
Accepted for publication August 23, 2016.
Anesthesiology April 2017, Vol. 126, 753–754.
Citation
Eric Hanson; Eulogy of the Scions of Jim Crow. Anesthesiology 2017; 126:753–754 doi: https://doi.org/10.1097/ALN.0000000000001357
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