The White Lion –
Don’t forget that name.
How many times have you heard that so and so,
is a distant relative of someone who came across,
on the Mayflower. You know that name!
The Mayflower, one of the most famous and mythic ships,
in the American cosmology.
Landing near Cape Cod with those Pilgrims in 1620.
We all know their god and worship.
Yet, while the First People were here with their religion and government
The Pilgrims were not the second.
What of the White Lion?
What you do not know about the 1st ship to bring people to America?
Could it be because their cargo had beautiful black skin?
That they were in truth the second people.
Yet those 20 or so people were from the Ndongo people,
in what is now Angola.
They were taken from Africa in the São João Bautista,
a Portuguese ship.
They probably gave praise when their ship was attacked,
by the English ship the White Lion.
They probably hoped and prayed that this meant their freedom,
for who could be so barbaric to reenslave newly enslaved people?
After defeating the Portuguese, the English sailors,
did not free them.
Imagine the tears!
As they were simply transferred from one hold to another.
To eventually be traded for food in the Virginia Colony.
What of their descendants?
Who are the descendants of those men and women,
who came to America in 1619 a year before,
those pious Pilgrims arrived.
What of the gods of the Ndongo people?
You know they were prayed to.
Why do we all not know of the White Lion?
We mostly know of the centuries of woe that the white men and women
who accepted that trade,
brought to this country.
Where are the monuments to the men and women of the White Lion?
Where are the memorials to their tears?
to our tears?
© words by Daniel DeMarle
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