Toi Derricotte's Poem on the Black Victims of the 1979 Boston Serial Murder

Poet and writer Toi Derricotte

Here's a poem written by brilliant poet Toi Derricotte.  It was written on the tenth anniversary of the Boston murders.  Twelve Black women were murdered in Boston in 1979.  The public and police indifference regarding the murders angered Black residents and loved ones of the victims.  The media wrote off the victims as being drug addicts, runaways, and prostitutes when the majority were none of the above.  

She and many other Black women and their allies were and still are tired of how society treats Black women in America and around the world.  We are sick and tired of seeing labels on Black women, of being stereotyped as loose Jezebels, angry, violent, hoodrats, junkies, etc.  That's why we have Black Girls Rock, My Black Is Beautiful, etc., to counteract the hateful rhetoric and treatment toward Black women by the dominant society as well as the Black community and communities of Color.

Her poem applies to serial murders and missing/murdered Black women, then and now.  This poem also speaks about the then ongoing serial murders of Black women in L.A.  

This also applies to the victims of Henry Louis Wallace.  To the victims of the Grim Sleeper.  To the trapped murdered victims of Cleveland Strangler Anthony Sowell.

This also applies to the 64,000 missing Black women all over America.

Also, to the 70+ Black female victims of unsolved serial murders in Chicago as I type this blog post.

On Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses by Toi Derricotte.

Mowing this three acres with a tractor,
a man notices something ahead-a mannequin-
he thinks someone threw it from a car. Closer
he sees it is the body of a black woman.

The medics come and turn her with pitchforks.
Her gaze shoots past him to nothing. Nothing
is explained. How many black women
have been turned up to stare at us blankly,

in weedy fields, off highways,
pushed out in plastic bags,
shot, knifed, unclothed partially, raped,
their wounds sealed with powdery crust.

Last week on TV, a gruesome face, eyes bloated shut.
No one will say, “She looks like she’s sleeping,” ropes
of blue-black slashes at the mouth. Does anybody
know this woman? Will anyone come fourth? Silence

like a backwave rushes into that field
where, just the week before, four other black girls
had been found. The gritty image hangs in the air
just a few seconds, but strikes me,

a black woman, there is a question being asked
about my life. How can I
protect myself? Even if I lock my doors,
walk only in the light, someone wants me dead.

Am I wrong to think
if five white women had been stripped,
broken, the sirens would wail until
someone was named?

Is is any wonder I walk over these bodies
pretending they are not mine, that I do not know
the killer, that I am just like any woman-
if not wanted, at least tolerated.

Part of me wants to disappear, to pull
the earth on top of me. Then there is this part
that digs me up with this pen
and turns my sad black face to the light…

Copyright 1989, reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.