Are My Hands Clean?

[Bernice Johnson Reagon raises the song:]
I wear garments touched [and others join in:]
By hands from all over the world
35% cotton
65% polyester
The journey begins in Central America in the cotton fields of El Salvador

In a province soaked in blood
Pesticide-sprayed workers toil in a broiling sun
Pulling cotton for two dollars a day

Then we move on up to another rung—Cargill
A top-forty trading conglomerate takes the cotton through the Panama Canal
Up the Eastern seaboard coming to the US of A for the first time
In South Carolina
At the Burlington mills

Joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of Dupont
Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela
Where oil riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day

Then Exxon
Largest oil company in the world
Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago
Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas to the factories of Dupont
On the way to the Burlington mills
In South Carolina
To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador

In South Carolina
Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric for Sears
Who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea
Headed for Haiti this time—
MAY SHE BE ONE DAY SOON FREE! [applause]

Far from the Port-au-Prince palace
Third-world women toil doing piece-work to Sears specifications
For three dollars a day
My sisters make my blouse!
It leaves the third world for the last time
Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me
This third-world sister!
And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse
On sale for 20% discount...

ARE MY HANDS...CLEAN?!?