C Liegh McInnis Reading "Brother Hollis (Slight Return)" for the Hollis Watkins Muhammad Memorial

C Liegh McInnis reading his poem "Brother Hollis (Slight Return)" for the Hollis Watkins Muhammad Memorial Service. This version features video of Mississippi Civil Rights icon Hollis Watkins Muhammad at the beginning and end of the video.
For Hollis Watkins (Slight Return)
by C. Liegh McInnis
From Mississippi’s McComb madhouse, swirling
with a cobra’s nest of combustible Klan calamity,
Hollis went marching into the breaking dawn of destiny.
The son of a carpenter sent to construct
some sovereignty for his people,
he planted his body at the intersection of
injustice to be a champion for Civil Rights.
A Summit solider sanctified by SNCC,
he heeded the clarion call
from a Moses molding fishers of men.
An early disciple of voter registration,
his blood boiled for direct action
so, with cool cowboy Curtis Hayes,
-sauntering into Dodge City
like Bill Pickett and Nat Love-
Hollis willingly walked into the Dragon’s Lair
filled with the flaming white violence
of Woolworth’s Drugstore looking for
the medicine of justice and demanding
to be served a breakfast platter of dignity.
One of the many Daniels who dared
to be seated at the Dragon’s dinner table,
and like all SNCC Shepherds
Hollis readily took the best cloth to wash
the feet of the people while himself being
marched from judgment hall to judgment hall
incarcerated for instigating humanity
while shocking and shaking the stool stains
of supremacy from southern psychopaths:
“Michael rowed the boat ashore hallelujah!”
A singing Civil Rights knight who preached
the gospel of crimson sacrifice
melting Mississippi’s Jim Crow iceberg
so that we can all be baptized
in the ruby river of righteousness.
And when the McComb Cage could
no longer clip their wings,
Hollis and Hayes strolled into the hell-pit of Hattiesburg
working as door to door liberation witnesses
while serving as sawmill stewards.
But like all great bluesmen Hollis knew
he had to stand at the dusty crossroad
of Deep South dichotomy where
direct action and voter registration danced
as far too many well-fed fat-pig Negroes
bloated with middle-class delusion
were cemented into submission by the
ice-cold grip of economic frostbite.
Still, Hollis submitted himself to serve
more time than most people attend school
his jail sentence becoming the fuel
that finally ignited and freed the masses
from their frigid fear while he fought for agendas
that illuminated the shining souls of the oppressed
rather than incinerating them into the ashes
of somebody else’s afterthought.
From a stampeding SNCC student
to a Tougaloo tornado twisting
white wrongs into rainbow rights
then blossoming into a fiery freedom school professor…
Your life is a Freedom Song
played in a spiraling wind that drips along
a magnolia breeze pregnant with evening storm clouds
rolling over Jim Crow levies;
“Ain’t scared of nobody ‘cause I want my freedom...”
Like the water we drink,
we live off royalties from your sweat,
and we find home by the crimson blueprint of your steps-
narrow, straight, and lonely is the highway of truth-telling,
but bright is the path that your freedom fire has floodlit for us.
You remain a grade school teacher correcting our wrongs.
With the fertilizer of history, you nurture our ebony seeds.
Your legacy is a resounding Southern Echo that
reverberates through the heart of Dixie like a steel dagger.
Mightier than Maytag and Whirlpool,
you are an agitator for justice,
washing the dirt of domination and control
from the dingy ideology of America.
“I’ll organize ‘cause I want my freedom...”
You helped to make crooked lines straight by lending
your voice to the re-drawing of geographic power pictures.
You are a bloody lamb that bore the cross of incarceration so
that we may drink from the cup of liberty more abundantly.
The twelfth disciple of a McComb matador,
you helped turn non-violence into a mighty weapon
to slay the Dragons of Dixie.
While starring in the première of Woolworth’s Opening Act,
inside, your thoughts and emotions were two wrestling
weather fronts, knowing you had to act illegally
to get some justice, as the weight of Ma and Pa’s wrought-iron
values saturated with salvation sat steadily on your shoulders
like shadows of history creeping into a new day.
You waited for breakfast,
knowing your meal would be a penitentiary omelet.
But you ate your fill so that we
may eat from the pie of freedom.
“I’ll tell the truth ‘cause I want my freedom...”
A tongue like a switchblade and a mind like a bullwhip,
you’ve shredded more white lies
than a tobacco company executive.
Your feet have walked up the backside of colonization.
Your eyes have seen through
the malaised mirrors of conservatism.
Your hands have coddled babies from
the smoking fire of Johnny Reb.
To read the full poem, email [e-mail].