Grace

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I died a nigga a long time ago.

Before you were born, before your mother was born, ’fore your grandmother.

I was seventeen.

Still am, I reckon. And everyone that was there that night is dead now, too, so it don’t matter that I was a nigga.

Or a slave.

What matters is I had a daughter, who had daughters, and they had theirs. Family I could’ve saved a whole lot of trouble by tellin ’em the things that I know.

But there are some stories that mothers never tell their daughters — secret stories. Stories that would prove a mother was once young, done thangs with men she could never tell, in ways she could never tell, and places she should never. Private stories where love, any ’semblance of love, would lead a person like me to the place I was that night in 1848. When I died.

FOR TWO DAYS and two nights we been running.

Me, and the child inside me.

Pain is trying to get me to stop, make me push away the pain but I won’t push.

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