Trade Street
Potato sweet
First place we ate
Arriving Winston oh-eight
Now here to recite
On a Friday night
Verses that may delight
If my accent’s heard right
Trade street, street of trade
Street is easy, a thoroughfare made
From fourth you wade
To Finnegan’s and fade
But trade is contentious
A crafty tool to confuse us
NAFTA and TTP become the focus
Of political hocus-pocus
Playing games with tariffs and taxes
To divert our money away from us
Trade, trade-in, trade-up
Trade mark, trade union, trade wind
Free trade, Fair trade
Sex trade, slave trade
Slaves, traded in hell
Snatched from the African well
Confined in the Atlantic swell
Stories too difficult to tell
Except maybe one story
Which I reflect on during my own trade circle
To arrive here in the Carolinas
Like folks did, two centuries before
You all know Amazing Grace
“How sweet the sound,
A wretch like me”
Few know who that wretch was
For forty years I lived in the Pool
That is Liverpool, the scouser’s home
Where the Beatles offered the world
A sound revolution
Liverpool, home to one apex of the slave triangle
Great ships sailed over the Mersey Bar
To Africa for their trade
Where they exchanged their cargo of trinkets
For humans, black and strong
Delivered by Arabs and militia
All down the west coast as far as
Cape Town, the second apex, where we also live
A slave was not the wretch I mentioned
They were worse than that, tied down
In the bowels of the British ships
Few survived to work on the plantations
In the third apex of the Caribbean region
Furnishing the labor for cotton, sugar
Rum, tobacco, all sent back, with profit
To the same Liverpool and other ports
Descendants of those who survived
Mingled in the southern states
Once released, many migrated north
As the history of the Carolinas
The Piedmont, Winston, even Trade Street
All testify today
For us, we still travel that triangle
Liverpool, Cape Town and Winston
All these years on
But where is that wretch
Every time I drove into Liverpool
To my office, looking down on ships in the Mersey
I would walk the last few yards
Along a street, a small, narrow street
Perversely named Great Newton Street
For most of the forty years, I did not give
A thought to who Newton was
Or why he was great
John Newton was a renegade
Flouting laws and decency in eighteenth century Britain
Caught and shanghaied, banished on a slave ship
Fought and swashbuckled through Africa
Sobered up to become a captain
He commanded a ship on the last side of the triangle
Ran into a storm off Irish Donegal where he prayed to God for mercy
The manifest moved and righted the ship, he was saved
The wretch, who had driven the slave trade
Was now saved, saw a light and heard a sweet sound
Gave up ships, a minister he became
Wrote Amazing Grace, grace that taught his heart to fear
And helped abolish slavery in the British dominions
Great Newton Street to Trade Street
Not a straight line, an uneven circle
Many other wretches found on the way,
Some but not all saved
The lesson is hard; yet even in the gutter
There may be more than one way to go
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA, March 2017
