subscribes, Enrolls his name into their pagan tribes Now wears the habit of a free-born Turk, His sword excepted, which lest they should work Just villainy to their seducers, is denied Unto all
runagates, unless employed In wars 'gainst Christians.
(10) At the market cross one might see the traveling duo of Banks and his famous horse, newly returned from Italy (reports of their deaths by fire for sorcery in Rome having proved premature), or thrill to the harangues of turbanned quacksalvers who might be anything from barbers, players, and peddlers to true exotics, "
runagate Jews, the cut-throats and robbers of Christians," according to one hysterical citizen.
His poetry anthology, From a Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets, was published in 1998 by
Runagate Multimedia, which he co-founded.
"I think what has happened, especially with things such as the recent Def Poetry Jam, is an emphasis on what works commercially by producers who have the connections and the money to mount television programs, films, and Broadway type productions," says Kalamu ya Salaam, writer/publisher of
Runagate Press.
He conceived his subject in epic terms, commencing with "Middle Passage," and on to "Gabriel," "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home," "
Runagate Runagate," "The Ballad of Nat Turner," "Frederick Douglass," "The Dream," " El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbaz," "A Letter from Phillis Wheatley," and "John Brown."
From a Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets (
Runagate Press, $25), a collection of poetry edited by Kalamu ya Salaam.
See also LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, eds., Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1968) and Robert Hayden, Selected Poems (New York: October House Inc., 1966), particularly "Middle Passage," 65-70; "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home," 71; "The Ballad of Nat Turner," 72-74; "
Runagate Runagate," 75-77, and "Frederick Douglass," 78.
Different times and spaces are fused until the dream represents both Brathwaite's paranoid sense of being shunned, judged, and rejected (ZM, 152, 181-82), and a historical return to the
runagate experience of the African slave, pursued through canefield and forest into the mountain fastness of his maroonage.
Their legacy is the lives their lives insure: the nameless slaves escaping to freedom in "
Runagate Runagate,' the "many lives' transfigured in "Middle Passage.' This idea is resoundingly expressed in Hayden's sonnet to Frederick Douglass, which begins,
(In "
Runagate,
Runagate," Hayden haunts us with "Mean mean mean to be free.") Can we really say what we would do once we are free, if, in fact, we can't identify in our most intimate physical knowledge the principal conditions of freedom?
