A Poetress On Learning About the Igbo Suicides and Thomas Spalding, 2008

In Griffin town, the name is carved in stone,

A legacy of wealth, too widely known.

But trace the thread of that forgotten ease,

Back to the cypress swamps and whispering seas.

The 1803 rice fields spread on Grand Sapelo’s ground,

Where Thomas Spalding’s fortune could be found.

His cotton bloomed from the soil of bitter pain,

Watered by tears and soaked by ceaseless rain.

Across the currents, in the fevered dark,

They bore the chains, a single, broken ark.

The Igbo came, their homeland far behind,

To meet a coast where cruelty was enshrined.

The chains were loosened on that awful deck,

The white man stood to claim his human wreck.

Before the shackles bound their feet to land,

They saw the shovel, the whip, the cruel command.

The Igbo stood on ground that was not yet a grave,

Chose the fierce, cold blessing of the wave.

They turned their faces from the planter’s gaze,

And offered back their breath in watery haze.

No whip could force them to the master’s call,

They linked their souls to make their righteous fall.

Into the swirling Dunbar Creek they stepped,

While silent, bitter angels watched and wept.

A final chant rose from their throats, wild and high,

A sound of magic meant to reach the sky.

“Kum yali kum buba tambe,” the story goes,

Defiance bloomed where the salt water flows.

The story says they didn’t sink and drown,

But with invisible wings escaped the cruelest crown.

The Igbo soared away from where the chains would bind,

Leaving the planter’s world and greed behind.

The daughter of the county reads the word,

And in her soul, the anguished cry is heard.

The weight of the name, now stained with drowning ghosts,

It pierces deep, where sorrow inter-hosts.

She feels the shackles cut, the water’s chill,

A history that bleeds against her will.

The county name is kin to this dark place,

And tears fall upon her Spalding County face.

By Anne Hendricks, M.Ed.

Edited by John T. Hendricks, Ph.D. and Gayle Goodin, Ph.D.

REVERLY AND REFLECTIONS, 2025

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