for Professor Tim Lake
1.
January 1, 1857: boarding in a barber’s backroom,
you watch the snow fall—lonely, cold, & white.
Dark-eyed juncos hunker in a leeward
dooryard. They gather under the windows
of your classroom. The lamplight hums there
in the woods west of Grant Street.
Your classrooms too are lonely, cold, & white.
Two weeks, two weeks: that’s how long
I’ll take to teach Phyllis Wheatley
& Frederick Douglass, with time to spare
for Paul Laurence Dunbar, your niece’s pupil,
who knew, like you, why the caged bird sings.
Two weeks before a warbler pokes beak
through eggshell—two weeks for
the college to expel (and expunge) you,
its first Black student; you were just sixteen.
But a man seen cannot be unseen,
and despite the silence we swept in thereafter—
our archives, my colleague tells me, offer
no cause—you lingered in the dreams
of your tormentors. Like a splinter, like a sunset—
like tinnitus that, as your classmates
march off to fight, thrums under drum roll
and snarl of musketry. How many
pictured you at the moment their bodies
stopped grapeshot or Minié ball? How many saw
your flesh anew—one more vessel,
unimaginably fragile, that’ll tire, tear, & whistle?
2.
Come back as the wind that scatters all
our ungraded papers. Come back as spring weather.
Come back as sun on my antebellum building
where white guys still look down on you
from the redoubt of their paintings.
Let’s grab two Sharpies—we’ll pirate patch
their glasses, we’ll raise horns from worn pomade.
But come back too as the man you grew into,
a figure who—teaching class, posing for photographs—
held the floor. I hold a picture now,
the one where you’re tall as a sycamore & poised
atop your signature, letters like a riverbed
from which you rose. That skill could get you killed
in the state where you were born enslaved.
Of course, you became a teacher.
Of course, you must come back to whisper
in the ears of our Black students
something I’ll never hear, like a wire’s heat
or water running under a frozen creek.
Tell the writer, tell the athlete, tell the freshmen
who flock together in my classrooms—these kids
I help or fail, flailing as if I were under water.
Tell the trees what you learned of winter.
It’s January, 2024. I walk beneath boughs furred
with snow. I want to hear your foot soles
find our bricks. I want to know you’re above us
still, like the swifts that fill the steeple
each summer—they swoop & flitter, surge & twitter
their song high atop this campus—you can do better.
Author’s Note
In 1857, Wabash College admitted its first Black student to its campus in Crawfordsville,
Indiana; within two weeks, he was asked to leave. For decades that student’s name,
background, and story were lost. Following 15 years of research, my colleague,
Professor Tim Lake, was able to identify the student as John. R. Blackburn—a former
slave and future educator—while also providing additional context for his time at
Wabash. This poem is based entirely on Prof. Lake’s research, for which I am deeply
grateful.
As Prof. Lake has conclusively shown, it was not Crawfordsville that ran Blackburn off
campus—as was previously believed—but a mix of racist students and an insufficiently
abolitionist administration and faculty. At the time of Blackburn’s departure, two white
students were also expelled. There’s no record for why any of these students left
campus. For more information on Prof. Lake’s work on John R. Blackburn, see the
articles that appeared in the Indianapolis Star, the Indianapolis Recorder, and WFYI.
Bio
Derek Mong is the author of four poetry collections, including When the Earth Flies into
the Sun, which is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books. Individual poems, essays, and
translations have appeared widely: the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon
Review, Blackbird, Free Inquiry, and New England Review. He and his wife, Anne O.
Fisher, received the Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected
Poems of Maxim Amelin (White Pine Press); they also co-edit the literary journal At
Length. He currently lives in Indiana, where he chairs the English Department at
Wabash College. You can read more at www.derekmong.com.