Our plantation was run by a Southern prince
who smoked syrup-thick tobacco with aged bourbon.
Playing "Mississippi Swinging," a forbidden Negro song,
my owner went into the girl’s cabin this evening all drunk,
searching for dirty deeds on a cool pecan grove afternoon.

Nina’s hands were delicate, loved by us,
held up defiantly at him. I heard it.
Once the boss man killed her without thinking
I decided to put it all beneath my bed with my forgetting box,
snuffing my bedroom candle with my spit-wet fingers.

In my dream, on this verse description, rhymed with Robert Johnson,
there is an old black dog in an angry dance with a rooster.
No money can buy the boss outta hell.
Scratch has his soul by the eyes.
Nina’s too wronged to find heaven yet—this ain’t over.

He carries Nina’s reckoning into the Big House.
I twisted around in my old sheets, all this in my head.
But that angry angel helps me. He hanged that cracker bastard
from a pecan tree. Bossman was swung by rope
taken from his own bedroom curtains.
It was mocking him, wrapped around his sorry Anglo neck.

I wake up and smile about Nina. The boss is mashed-dead like her now.
Hell hounds gnawing at his throat. But my Nina can sleep in her
honest grave tonight, her body smooth like coal again.