OUT OF THIS HOUSE
But I will not go back to that house ever.
I heard it fir·st in the talk that goes in families,
Half-articulate, a lament recalling
What good the fathers had and lost. I heard
They were among the eight percent who lived
Bending the Negro backs to cotton and canefield,
And their house stood soundly for a time
Built in the wash of sweat from the black thighs.
When I came in the book to the place where living
Was a choice of SOli thern slavery
Or Northern sweatshop, I thought that house ended.
But I could feel it because it was in the blood
With the Negroes singing, and at that
tim~
I said
That if you threw out madmen like John Brown
The South had better men, and better men
Than you could find today living anywhere.
My fathers all were dead inside that house.
Their sons were wandering North from desolation.
These also were my fathers. There was nothing
A man could do unless he worked for money,
But they did not know either how to keep
Or how to spend it. I began to think
The house 'Was stood on the eternal shoulders
Of one who crept beneath it, cherishing,
Inside, its ruined and strangled remnants. I saw
That South or North it was the same damned house.
N ow that I am leaving these poor rooms
The house will call me fool, or the house will say
(Knowing deceit will not change my intention)
That only traitor rats abandon vessels
Caught in the whimpering- terror of the end
And it will hate the ones that creep from under.
41
