Unhired Hands by David Mills (Poetry ’16)
Poetry alum David Mills has a new collection, Unhired Hands, out from Broadstone Books. Read an excerpt below.
Unhired Hand
(After enslaved Quock Walker’s three Worcester, Massachusetts trials, which led to Walker’s freedom from Nathaniel Jennison in 1781)
I offer you my unhired hand
so I can do the whatever work
wearing clothes outfitted in failure,
outfitted in questions of was I
servant or slave. The Caldwells,
the brothers of my older former,
who mastered them (my mother father)
had me working land fertilized
by a cemetery of fish. Let me work
with corn and squash in hens of guinea
and Cornish. Fence me in, invisibly.
Yeoman Nathaniel Jennison
married my older former’s widow
and took me to court believing
he owned me, believing he could
administer a “proper disciplinary
beating.” How could I desert a master
for I would also have to desert
the servant I never was (to him)? What
of Exodus: “any slave who has been
purchased may eat of it after
circumcision.” The Passover,
the wandering in a clinched
wilderness. Eat of it. Then let
the earth issue a verdict about Jennison
trying to reclaim my spit and ankles, trying
to drag me back to those sour hours, trying
to lock me in an outbuilding. Encouraged
by the brother blood of my former master
I dragged Jennison before a judge
for assault. The law is a black letter.
I beg your leave: I am not services
to be reclaimed, a bill of sale for probate.
A fetter. I am not Jennison’s few friends
circling me (with Medford rum circling
their tongues). I am not a case that rests
because my mistress now rests in peace.
I am neither implied nor expressed, a Christian
trip and fall. I am indisputable, a contract’s
absence, a holy writ. Or yes, I may be
the Caldwell’s plan, the crack of abolition’s
ham-handed gavel as I stand in Worcester’s
court of common pleas and ask for 300
pounds in damages already done. There’s
a constitution plump in my skull because
I am now beyond the jurisdiction of flinch.
I am not theory and practice but flesh’s
plaintiff, breath’s 18th century evidence
Jennison’s point unproven, justice’s hiccup
a pinch of abolition, a legal sprinkle under
intense scrutiny, a verdict and the way
it slowly returns.
