When Fannie Lou Hamer said

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired
……..She meant
……………..No more turned cheek
……………..No more patience for the obstruction
……………..of black woman’s right to vote
……………..& plant & feed her family
……..She meant
……………..Equality will cost you your luxurious life
……………..If a Black woman can’t vote
……………..If a brown baby can’t be fed
……………..If we all don’t have the same opportunity America promised
……..She meant
……………..Ain’t no mountain boulder enough
……………..to wan off a determined woman
……..She meant
……………..Here
……..Look at my hands
……………..Each palm holds a history
……………..of the 16 shots that chased me
……………..harm free from a plantation shack
……..Look at my eyes
……………..Both these are windows
……………..these little lights of mine
……..She meant
……………..Nothing but death can stop me
……………..from marching out a jail cell still a free woman
……..She meant
……………..Nothing but death can stop me from running for Congress
……..She meant
……………..No black jack beating will stop my feet from working
……………..& my heart from swelling
……………..& my mouth from praying
……..She meant
……………..America! you will learn freedom feels like
……………..butter beans, potatoes & cotton seeds
……………..picked by my sturdy hands
……..She meant
……..Look
……..Victoria Gray, Anna Divine & Me
……..In our rightful seats on the house floor
……..She meant
……………..Until my children
……………..& my children’s children
……………..& they babies too
……………..can March & vote
……………..& get back in interest
……………..what was planted
……………..in this blessed land
……..She meant
……………..I ain’t stopping America
……………..I ain’t stopping America
Not even death can take away from my woman’s hands
what I’ve rightfully earned

Copyright © 2019 by Mahogany Browne. Originally featured in Vibe, then on the American Academy of Poets website. Used with permission of the author.

Listen to Browne reading her poem here. Permission granted by Mahogany Browne on 12/30/19.

Mahogany L. Browne was born in Oakland, California. She received an MFA in writing and activism from the Pratt Institute and is the author of several poetry collections and chapbooks, including Kissing Caskets (YesYes Books 2017), Smudge (Button Poetry 2016), Redbone (Aquarius Press 2015), and #Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out Online (Penmanship Books 2010). She is also the author of the children’s books Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice (Roaring Brook Press 2020), Black Girl Magic (Roaring Brook Press 2018), and Woke Baby (Roaring Brook Press 2018). In addition, she is the editor of His Rib: Stories, Poems & Essays by HER (Penmanship Books 2007). An award-winning performance poet, Browne is active in the spoken-word community and the founder and publisher of Penmanship Books, created “as the answer to the performance poet’s publishing problem.” She has released five LPs of her work and has served as the poetry program director and Friday Night Slam curator for the Nuyorican Poets Café. Browne has received fellowships from the Arts for Justice Fund, AIR Serenbe, Cave Canem, and Poets House, among other honors and awards. She is the artistic director of Urban Word NYC and lives in Brooklyn, New York. [Source here.]

Read an essay by Browne, “Dismantling Rage: On Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider,” here.

Commentary by Rebecca Foust, Poetry Editor

I met Mahogany Browne at the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2018 when she emceed at a Brooklyn Book Festival event curated by Melissa Stein and me, one of several “Poetry World Series” readings in San Francisco, Mill Valley, Seattle, and New York City since 2008. How far away those packed, loud, and rowdy readings feel now! Anyway, Mahogany Browne killed it as host that night, and I was not at all surprised to find that her poetry resonated with me as well.

Her poem for today is one of many I’ve been collecting since the November 2020 election to remind myself of the strength and resilience of the American spirit and our ability—most of the time—to believe in the integrity and endurance of our precious democracy. “When Fanny Lou Hamer said” opens in a fed-up, “no more turned cheek” moment, with its namesake grown weary of the unrelenting struggle to assert her right to participate in America’s most basic promises of equality. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” it begins in Hamer’s voice, casting all that will follow as an extended exegesis of this line and explanation of what it is that Hamer is—and by extension, this speaker and perhaps all Black women are— sick and tired of.

Fannie Lou Hamer has appeared in Poetry Sunday before in Evie Shockley’s poem, “women’s voting rights at one hundred (but who’s counting?),” featured here last October. Who was she? Born in 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer was a lifelong American activist, community organizer, and civil rights leader. She cofounded the Freedom Democratic Party and represented it at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and she worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to organize Mississippi’s Freedom Summer. Hamer’s efforts to run for the U.S. Senate in 1964 and the Mississippi State Senate in 1971 were unsuccessful, but she did decades of valuable work for the National Women’s Political Caucus, an organization she cofounded to recruit, train, and support women seeking election to government office.

During her long activist years, Hamer showed great courage and a willingness to put her body on the line. She was extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted while trying to register for and exercise the right to vote, her own and that of thousands of Black Mississippi voters. Hamer also helped disenfranchised people through programs like the Freedom Farm Cooperative, and sued the government of Sunflower County, Mississippi for illegal segregation—maintaining the flame, it seems, almost right up until her death in 1977. [Source here.] A good article describing Hamer’s life and work in more detail can be read here.

Let’s get back now to the speaker in Browne’s poem, the one telling readers what Fanny Lou Hamer “means” when she says, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” What she means is that no violence or threat (“no black jack beating”) can dim Fanny Lou Hamer’s (and by extension, this speaker’s) determination and hope for a better political future for Black women in America. In fact, “nothing but death” (a phrase repeated, with some variations, three times in the poem) will prevent these women from asserting their rights. The tone is fierce and patriotic, the poem expressing its belief in the core values of our country: equal representation, equal opportunity, free speech, and participation in government. America has not yet achieved its lofty goals, but still, it is a “blessed land” loved and valued by this speaker.

As it happens, the poem opens and closes in Hamer’s voice with two direct quotes: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” and then “Not even death can take away from my woman’s hands / what I’ve rightfully earned.” Between these bookends, the poem’s text is organized by means of repetition, primarily through a literary device called anaphora. We’ve seen it before, this repetition of a word or phrase at the beginnings of lines. It’s an old rhetorical strategy found in the Bible, and orators have long used it to capture their audiences’ attention and to drive their message home. You’ll find it in speeches by JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama, and we heard it, ringingly, in Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem on January 20, featured in last week’s Poetry Sunday column.

Anaphora can be quite powerful, and it is valued by politicians and poets alike for its incantatory effect. Interestingly, what gets repeated does not necessarily have to be strong or even stand on its own—its hypnotic magic depends merely upon it being heard and said more than one time. As you will recall from just about any speech by MLK, simply repeating words and phrases exerts a haunting and compelling power, especially in front of a live audience.

Here, anaphora occurs in the phrase “She meant,” repeated ten times at the beginning of successive stanzas. This, in effect, establishes what follows as an extended interpretation of the line by Hamer that opens the poem. Another repeated phrase, “Look at my,” begins another two stanzas, roughly in the middle of the poem. In other examples of anaphora, the conditional “If” begins three lines, and “nothing but death” is repeated verbatim twice, and then modified to “not even death” at the end of the poem.

What is the effect of all this anaphora? As noted above, it organizes the poem and sets up its scaffolding. The main effect, though, is that it communicates emotional urgency in a way that feels powerful and sacred. Through the “she meant” construct, the poet interprets Hamer’s statement about being out of “patience” for “the obstruction” of Black women’s most basic rights, and finds much, too much,  in it to resonate with today. I would so love to hear Browne read this poem aloud, and I encourage you to listen to the recording inked above.

I read “Equality will cost you your luxurious life” not as a threat, but as a simple, practical statement about how democracy works: When large groups of people are systematically suppressed, it destabilizes the entire system and hurts everyone. The contrast in this poem, between “luxury” and poverty (“If a brown baby can’t be fed”), is stark, but what this speaker wants is not the luxury. What she wants is what Hamer wanted—the most basic of the rights our founders promised—“to vote / & plant & feed her family.”

The spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer inhabits today’s poem, and her presence reminds me that if times are hard now, they were hard before, and America got through them somehow. In affirming America’s resilience along with its core values, in addition to this speaker’s absolute determination to see them enacted in her lifetime, the poem gives me hope. It is a powerful and peaceful form of protest. It does not advocate insurrection, does not break into our nation’s capital to erect gallows for lawmakers, beat a policeman to death, or snap selfies of desecrations like defecating on the rotunda floor. Instead, “When Fanny Lou Hamer said” champions the assertion of the most basic human and civil rights through means sanctioned by our Constitution: peaceful assembly and protest, voting, running for office, and the everyday radical acts of poetry, hope, and prayer.