Selling Babies in Shelby County

^{With Peter Datcher}

Dirt could run up and over a mountain
before a slave mother could see her child again

In Shelby County, the sale of a baby
could buy a pretty calf or more land
for a white woman’s inheritance

Selling babies in Alabama financed
more plantation property
Healthy, fat babies and first born children
handed away for dollars and dimes

Groomed for hire, for ungodly servitude–
taught to put the wash out
before they could speak
They were raggedy dolls for white children

Some carried the blue eyes of white daddies.
In the backyard quarters where the moon
hid from the earth
Can you hear the crying of those mothers?

Of the land where the crash of the ax marked
the hard dirt?