UNHIRED HANDS, poetry by David Mills

This nation is built of the labor of unhired hands – the hands of enslaved peoples – and David Mills yokes history and poetry to tell the stories of some of those hands. Through his compelling narrative and persona poems we are introduced to “Victoria Earle Matthews, Martha Peterson and Millie Tunnell, three African-American women who had been enslaved and who are buried in cemeteries in Queens, New York,” and in a fourth section he writes of “Massachusetts slavery… because, in 1641, Massachusetts was the first North American colony to legally enslave Africans.” By focusing on the history of slavery far from antebellum cotton fields, Mills instructs us on the pervasive endemic legacy of this institution. Writing of an 18th century Massachusetts colonist who beat his slave to death and went largely unpunished he asks, “How do the chasms in Christendom / answer for this offense?” It is a question yet awaiting an answer. Read more