The Smile in the Mugshot (Rosa Parks)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were not tired.
Everyone says
you were tired
and you were not tired.
You were a trained organizer
who had spent
twelve years
working for the NAACP
in Montgomery
and you knew
exactly
what you were doing
when you sat down
on that bus
on the first of December
nineteen fifty-five
and you were
not tired
you were
ready.

[Verse 2]
The driver said
move.
You said no.
The driver said
I will have you
arrested.
You said
*you may do that*
in the voice
of a woman
who had practiced
the sentence
in her head
for twelve years
and had finally
been given
the occasion
to say it out loud
to the person
it was
intended for.

[Chorus]
The mugshot
is the part
they put
in the textbooks
and the mugshot
is smiling
and the smile
is not defiance
and the smile
is not relief
and the smile
is the face
of a woman
who has just
done the thing
she trained for
and done it
correctly
and the training
held.

[Verse 3]
The boycott
lasted three hundred
and eighty-one days
and the buses
in Montgomery
ran empty
for over a year
because a woman
who was not tired
had sat down
and fifty thousand people
who were tired
had stood up
and walked
to work
for thirteen months
in the rain
and the heat
and the dark
and the shoes
wore out faster
than the city
could hold out.

[Outro]
They put you
in the textbooks
as a woman
who was tired
and sat down
because tired women
are easier to explain
than trained women
and trained women
are harder to dismiss
than the textbooks
are comfortable with.

The smile
in the mugshot
knows
exactly
which version of the story
is going to win.
It is not
the textbook version.
It is the one
where you
were ready.

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