Maya Angelou, We Wear The Mask [VIDEO]

#MayaAngelou #TheMask #BlackHistory #BlackAmerican

The Mask

by Maya Angelou

We wear the mask that grins and lies.
It shades our cheeks and hides our eyes.
This debt we pay to human guile
With torn and bleeding hearts…
We smile and mouth the myriad subtleties.
Why should the world think otherwise
In counting all our tears and sighs.
Nay let them only see us while
We wear the mask.

We smile but oh my God
Our tears to thee from tortured souls arise
And we sing Oh Baby doll, now we sing…
The clay is vile beneath our feet
And long the mile
But let the world think otherwise.
We wear the mask.

When I think about myself
I almost laugh myself to death.
My life has been one great big joke!
A dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke.
I laugh so hard HA! HA! I almos’ choke
When I think about myself.

Seventy years in these folks’ world
The child I works for calls me girl
I say “HA! HA! HA! Yes ma’am!”
For workin’s sake
I’m too proud to bend and
Too poor to break
So…I laugh! Until my stomach ache
When I think about myself.
My folks can make me split my side
I laugh so hard, HA! HA! I nearly died
The tales they tell sound just like lying
They grow the fruit but eat the rind.
Hmm huh! I laugh uhuh huh huh…
Until I start to cry when I think about myself
And my folks and the children.

My fathers sit on benches,
Their flesh count every plank,
The slats leave dents of darkness
Deep in their withered flank.
And they gnarled like broken candles,
All waxed and burned profound.
They say, but sugar, it was our submission
that made your world go round.

There in those pleated faces
I see the auction block
The chains and slavery’s coffles
The whip and lash and stock.

My fathers speak in voices
That shred my fact and sound
They say, but sugar, it was our submission
that made your world go round.

They laugh to conceal their crying,
They shuffle through their dreams
They stepped ’n fetched a country
And wrote the blues in screams.
I understand their meaning,
It could an did derive
From living on the edge of death
They kept my race alive
By wearing the mask! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

NOTES:
An adaptation of the poem by Paul Lawrence “We Wear the Mask”

Comments

A call for equality and freedom, it became one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement

#MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #IHaveaDream I Have a Dream, speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., that was delivered on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington. A call for equality and freedom, it became one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement and one of the most iconic speeches in American history. Some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington. The one-day event both protested racial discrimination and encouraged the passage of civil rights legislation; at the time, the Civil Rights Act was being discussed in Congress. The march featured various speeches as well as musical performances before King, a celebrated orator, appeared as the final official speaker; A. Philip Randolph and Benjamin Mays ended the proceedings with a pledge and a benediction, respectively. Early in his prepared speech, King referenced Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address with “Five score years ago….” He then spoke a...

9 things about MLK's speech and the March on Washington

#MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #MarchonWashington #IHaveaDream "I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin." The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words in 1963, but this was not the speech that would go down as one of the most important addresses in US history. King spoke these words in Detroit, two months before he addressed a crowd of nearly 250,000 with his resounding "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs on August 28, 1963. Several of King's staff members actually tried to discourage him from using the same "I have a dream" refrain again. As we all know, that didn't happen. But how this pivotal speech was crafted is just one of several interesting facts about what is one of the most important moments in the 2...

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

#MLK #Assassination #MartinLutherKingJr #Memorial National Civil Rights Museum The Lorraine Motel where James Earl Ray assassinated King on April 4, 1968, is a complex of museums that trace the civil rights movement in the U.S. from the 17th century to the present. #MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #Memorial https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.: Some of His Most Powerful Quotes

#MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #IHaveaDream “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” – from his Dec. 18, 1963, speech at Western Michigan Universty “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” – during a speech in Detroit, Michigan, on June 23, 1963 “On some positions cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” – during a Feb. 6, 1968, speech in Washington, D.C. “The beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace is more precious than diamonds or silver or gold.” – from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 10, 1964 “Violence is impractical because it is a descendi...

Triple5Light Therapy

Search This Blog