On December 5, 1791, Benjamin Banneker wrote the following entry in his dream journal:
On the night of the fifth of December 1791, Being a deep Sleep, I dreamed that I was in a public Company, one of them demanded of me the limits of Rassanah Crandolph’s Soul had to display itself in, after it departed from her Body and taken its flight. In answer I desired that he show me the place of Beginning “thinking it like making a Survey of the Land.” He replied I cannot inform you but there is a man about three days journey from Hence that is able to satisfy your demand, I forthwith went to the man and requested of him to inform me place of beginning of the limits that Rasannah Crandolph’s soul had to display itself in, after the Seperation from her Body; who gave me answer, the Vernal Equinox, When I returned I found the Company together and I was able to Solve their Doubts by giving them the following answer: Quincunx.
What that dream meant, only God truly knows. This poem is just a dream of a dream:
I lately dreamt that the ambit
of Rassanah’s merit is 5
meridians of this world; 10
hours from the blast of Aries’
Shofar, a little less than half
of the soul’s compass; and what keeps
a soul from its full day’s traverse?
The earth turns, the sun moon and stars
March in procession, rhythm and
rebirth, breath and heartbeat in our
bones and blood; things known without words
Life and love’s gravity and pull,
wind and tide; Listen: no whale knows
more of the salt sea than your veins
Listen: to the billowing rush
of wavebreak and the hissing sigh
of recession. Sun, wind, and wave;
whispers rising to hurricaned
shout against our willful deafness
scribing sacred truths in our flesh
in letters of terror and wonder
under a fury of ocean
and sky that teaches mountains to
fear and reminds our shivering
blood that it holds power over
life only because it is the
ocean’s kin, only because we
are the flotsam and jetsam
of a storm’s Apocalypse,
a scattering of seeds for life’s
own deep, implacable purpose.
And yet breath and blood, sun and moon,
sex and birth, hunger and thirst are
only measures of seasons,
of all that has been and will be,
again and again and again
the sum and simplicity of
a law that we do not even
half fulfill. Rassanah said that
the ambit of our action is
5/12 at best; if only we
would sail with the wind’s blessing like
beings born of spirit that know what
wings are for, instead of beating
into the gale; how many more
signs we would see before the end
of our days, before the storm shows
us what blood learned from the sea: we
have no more than we are given
and so we are all, and nothing
