I.
They called it a joke
A satire
A smear of a man in a wig
As if a Black scholar was too far-fetched to be anything but fantasy
As if knowledge had a color and his wasn’t right

II.
But Francis Williams—
he was not their fiction
He was fact
Jamaican born under the tyranny of slavery
He was freedom cracked open by a mind that would not be chained nor contained

He studied stars while they studied skin—
Tracing Halley’s comet with ink-stained fingers
His eyes aligned with the heavens
while theirs were stuck in the mire of bigotry and hate

III.
They bought the painting for the wood
Fine mahogany—the kind enslaved hands carved but couldn’t claim
Ignored the man standing proud, scrolls and instruments like armor around him
They saw furniture
They missed the future he foretold

IV.
But truth has layers
Centuries later X-rays peeled them back
High-resolution told the tale:
This wasn’t ridicule
This was intuitive wisdom
To commission a self-portrait not to mock but to mark a mind that mattered
To inscribe in intricate details—preserved in posterity—a testament that his life mattered

A Jamaican polymath defying every odd
He challenged the limitations of slave society
With equations and celestial calculations that mapped freedom across the sky, across the centuries

V.
They tried to erase him with silence
But silence? It’s brittle
And Francis? He’s breaking through
One scan, one verse, one truth at a time

So, say his name
Not as footnote, but foundation
Say his name
Like a revolution that rhymes:
Francis Williams
The genius they tried to forget
The comet they couldn’t contain
The portrait they tried to bury—
but couldn’t keep in the frame

Backstory: This poem is based on the article in The Guardian, “X-ray evidence of Black maths scholar portrait reveals snubbed genius”. Clues in a self-portrait commissioned by Francis Williams—a wealthy Jamaican polymath who was born free under the tyranny of slavery —to prove that he successfully managed to compute and witness the trajectory of Halley’s comet over Jamaica in 1759. A complex figure himself, yet his intellectual achievements are worth preserving and retelling.

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In creative solidarity, Dee