Anatomy Lesson

Mose Graves

Your kneecap (proper name: patella) is more or less triangular in shape.
It attaches to your thighbone (femur), the longest in your body,
where it serves to protect your tibio-femoral joint and 
helps you bend your knee and move it side to side.
Derek Chauvin’s kneecap was shaped 
like his police badge, which
also was intended to
“protect and serve.”

Your neck
is made up of eight bones,
seven cervical vertebrae and the hyoid—
a little U-shaped bone with two greater horns
and two lesser ones. Your cervical vertebrae let you
hang your head or hold it high, and shake it “yes” or “no.”
The hyoid bone attaches to muscles (the hyoglossus, the stylohyoid)
you use to wag your tongue and say whatever you please.
In the eight minutes that Derek Chauvin’s patella
knelt on his cervical vertebrae George Floyd
used the muscles attached to his hyoid bone
to say: “Please, please, please”
and: “I can’t breathe”
and: “Mama!”

In Houston, where 
George Floyd and I grew up
(eight miles and twenty years apart)
your melanin once determined where
you could eat and drink and rest your bones. 
The bones of many, many men whose skin was 
rich in melanin now rest 18 miles southwest of downtown Houston
in unmarked graves at the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugarland, Texas.
There Edward Cunningham and Littleberry Ellis reinvented the old plantation, 
leasing prisoners to cut cane, sunup ‘til dark, until the hard-boiled men they rented 
dropped dead in the fields. Huddie Ledbetter tried to warn George Floyd 
about the knee on the neck and the meaning of melanin,
tried to teach him what all he had learned in 7 years
stripping and chopping and boiling down cane in
the “Hellhole-on-the-Brazos.” Ledbelly sang:

“If you ever go to Houston, boy, you better walk right
and you better not squabble, and you better not fight.” 
But the Statesman stated: “All men are created equal,” 
and the Preacher preached: “Free at last, free at last,”
‘til all those stirring words, reverberating, slurred 
the melanin in George Floyd’s inner ear.

Derek Chauvin was born and raised in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, not far from Fort Snelling where 
Dred and Harriet Scott lived together
with their master, an army surgeon,
(just fifteen minutes from 
the Cup Foods store where 
George Floyd’s neck 
will be forever linked 
to Derek Chauvin’s knee).
Even before we had a Constitution 
to guarantee the blessings of liberty 
to ourselves and our posterity, 
the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery 
in Wisconsin Territory, so you can see 
how, up to the moment when Judge Taney 
returned them to servitude in St. Louie,
the Scotts (just like George Floyd) might be
forgiven for thinking they were free. 

When Dr. John Emerson, 
the man who owned the Scotts,
was forced to amputate a soldier’s leg
(crushed by a cannonball, or shot with lead,
or studded with Saukie arrowheads)
he saved the patella 
to make “a fine stump 
capable of bearing 
the full weight
of the body.”

The full weight 
of Officer Chauvin’s body,
transferred through
his kneecap to
the bones in
George
Floyd’s
neck

confirms our diagnosis that the sickness to be feared 
is not the trauma but the undebrided wound— 
the sepsis, uncontested, that taints the blood
and rots the flesh away.

“Pyaemia,” Dr. Emerson would say, 
grunting over his bone saw. What today
we call a staph infection
and treat with medicine.

The Science

Race remains a potent and divisive force in the United States, in large part because American racial notions are confused with class and inflamed by fear. The shadow of the Civil War continues to loom over the country; while technology has progressed, the nation is still trapped in Reconstruction. Medicine and its vocabulary can help set the record straight, as scientific language emphasises our common biological features. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last year led to world-wide protests. The stark facts of that incident, described in anatomical terms and placed in historical context, add to our understanding and point to the possibility of a cure for our malaise.

The Poet

Mose Graves is a poet based in California who writes and works in the Western United States, from New Orleans to the Pacific Northwest. His poems have appeared in Chiron Review, Austin Pulpwood and other small publications.

Next poem: Development and Diversity by Tausif Ahmed Sayed