I found freedom crouching in a shallow lake. Between a river swallowing the blood of my ancestors and a mountain trembling at the hands of God. Her flesh resembled buried soil, crumbling between my palms and into small collections of liberty lost. Her voice, minute yet coarse, croaked with impossible symphonies, smothered ballads creaking between syllables. She peered into the pastures of my soul and found only longing and resistance. With her coils wrapping around my tongue and the soles of my feet, she said true liberation is a concept. That it screams with the win.. She told me the freedom she held was one no woman should ever want. That women with a freedom like her now live beneath the lake, swaying violently against the current, never again coming up for air.
The next morning I awoke to walls heavy with mama's hymns, pslams reciting my Papa’s passing.
Papa aint dead, but he resides in another world. Caught in the wisps of a yearning time, becoming a great wanderer long after Mama’s heart had settled. Men can do that, Mama used to say, take time to heal, drift softly, as they do, into daylight. Leaving only tiny specks of luminance, reminiscent during the nighttime, as to capture the trails of their great escape, mapping their flee on the horizon, abandoning just enough of them themselves to keep our gaze, but never enough to bring them back home.
The air felt cool and at peace with my awakening and I thought back to the night before. I gave up searching for freedom long before I found her and even now I wonder why she hides from those whose lives have been stomped out by the mammoths of mankind. She felt like God in that way.
“Cleopatra, baby” Mama stood shoulders collapsed along the side of my door frame, charcoal-colored hair slumping down her back, exhausted from the heavy weight of 38 years without relief. She believed you must hold onto as much of your ownness as you could as a woman, for the world had been stealing tiny pieces of your soul since birth. And passing this tradition down to her three daughters, our sunburnt, outer shell-coconut colored hair, too carried the weight of our 17 years and all their reincarnations.
“Lay yuh thoughts on me, baby.” She began moving from the doorway towards my window pane in small steps. Something still humming beneath her words not deliberately, as if it hoped to be heard, just innately. And her tongue seemed to stagger on the direction of her questioning, never quite sure if she meant to question her daughters or herself.
“Its nothin’, mama.” I looked up towards her, Papa’s eyes, my eyes, bleeding into her, bathing in her Old Magnolia swamps. She stood fiercely.
“Nothin’ don’t exist in the minds of black flesh, baby. We always twistin’ and turnin’ with a whole lotta chaos. And I said I wouldn’t never be like my Grandmama, 'llowin’ nothin to pick at my daughters’ flesh, doin’ nothin’ while yuh crumble and crumble. Yuh ain't gots tuh tell me if yuh hurtin’, but yuh best tell yuhself.”
“And yuh gots to tell yuhself too then, huh? How many conversations do yuh be havin’ with da Lord, instead of yuhself huh? I don’t needs to be told how tuh do my processin’, ain’t no bad dreams tuh sift through, cause there aint no time to be dreamin.” My voice thrashing heavily against Mama’s shores exposed chattels of somethings and everythings veiled beneath my spoken nothingness.
Her eyes hushed calmly, my Papa-eyes pierced deeply. These were the remnants of Papa that gnawed at Mama’s heart when she could no longer find herself within her daughters. Our bloodshot eyes, anger croaking in our belly, the words that pulled at our skin until we were no longer ourselves. The shape-shifting that consumed us each time she peered deeper beyond our ribcage. It was our morphing that kept her at God’s will, the constant grieving of watching her daughters die at the hands of their father’s spirit rising.
Steadying my feet on the hardwood floor, I raged past the fountain of my mother and towards my sisters’ canyons. Sheba and Nefertiti existed as great expanses of castor oil and kenyan soil. Undertones of the nile river and rebellion sunk in their tree bark skin. Racing down our mother’s birth canal, they had both thrusted full-speed into a foggy and dense beginning, leaving our mother’s womb behind for a world unprepared and unwilling to love three dark baby girls who would grow to become rainforests in a vast desert.
Entering the kitchen, my sisters’ work unbothered by my emergence, I pushed myself up onto the island and spread my limbs out until I could taste the edge, it’s wonder prickling at my feet.
“Well look who's finally awoken from her slumber, only to find rest here...in the kitchen” Nefertiti laughed, equally focused on picking at a stranded baby coil,atop her head, attempting to flee the mother nest, pulling at the split end until the hair duplicated itself into spider-web thin strands of lace, she then pulled and pulled as if to sever the root of the follicle completely, but this baby coil held tightly, as if in the moment between freedom and allegiance, it had decided it wanted to stay, in it’s mother nest, to live in a flood of sameness rather than to die, free but alone. I wonder why Father hadn't done the same.
“I had a dream last night, or at least I think it was a dream...” I mentioned, pulling my weight off of the sinking island and back into the wooden sea.
“Maybe it was a message from the ancestors. You know mother believes that the women of our tribe sleep beneath our beds and swim in our tea.” Sheba scoffed, slicing up some plantain and placing it in the burning coconut oil.
Deconstructing my face in her mind, she moved closer towards me, “If I weren’t me, I’d think you were”, she whispered, with a sense of sadness, as if she pitied our likeness. Turning toward Neferteri, Sheba examined the eyes that matched her own, the chestnut brown hue and the moon crescent shape. Secretly, she contemplated the destruction it would take to erase the Blackness that kept her trapped. Away, away, she wished herself away in her dreams, lucid dreams and against God’s skin, her religion, she’d lose herself- to his milky touch, to his coconut cream.
My mother gave us the names of Black Queens, in hopes that their freedom would swim through the blood of her daughters. But, maybe the water was polluted or maybe they weren’t willing to sacrifice the tiniest bit of independence Black women have, even in death, for three dark girls in a land full of ghosts, because liberation never came, and Sheba’s mind remained wrapped in shackles. Quite ironic isn’t it, that a girl named after the Black Queen who ruled over the only country in Africa, Ethiopia, to never be colonized by White people, can’t seem to rid herself of the four hundred year old chains that drowned our ancestors.
“Why must you always mock the history of our people, Sheba. You know, this deterrence and abolishment of your blackness, of the women who protect you, who you neglect, it’s easily seen through. We are your sisters, in blood, time, and spirit. Each of us, a ripple in the same river the women of our ancestry molded for us to bathe in, to cleanse in. You cannot dispel the history that runs through your veins. And you sure as hell will not degrade the spirit of our mother, who is only attempting to survive in a rotting country, whether she does this through clutching at tethers to Africa or self-defacement, as you do, you have no place judging her, we all have our ways of coping with continuous death, continus loss. We’re all shrinking, but mother has roots to regrow, what will you have? ” Nefertiti huffed towards the river flowing in our boiling pot, pouring the salt recovered from Grandmother the last time we had been in Jamaica into her curry stew.
This salt, like our mother, like Nefertiti, like most immigrants and outliers lying in foreign lands weeped for the sense of belonging found only in a grandmother’s soup. And not just the grandmother of familial ancestry, but the grandmother of your people’s history, the monarch of Black womanhood, this salt was our bodies re-entering the Grandmother womb, searching for healing and acceptance.
“Get off your high horse, Nefertiti. You speak like you know my struggle, like you’ve heard my truths, and have carried the weight of my realities. Yes, I am one of three, born with the same blood as you and Cleopatra and mom. Our roots run deep and intersect inevitably. But you don’t know shit about my form coping, you’ve captured freedom in Blackness and that's great for you, but we all know goddamn well what it is to be a Black woman in this world. And I don’t remember my ancestors watching over me, every time I was brutalized, politicized, exploited, dehumanized, and assaulted by the same people who call us Nubian Queens, who call us mother Earth, I don’t remember being kissed and hugged by aunties who were willing to claim the ugly beneath my passivity. So, cut the savior act with me. Just as you claim to see right through me, I see you. And you let me know if the world's going to love me when I’m not fucking strong, and compromising, and fair, and beautiful, and nurturing, but when I’m fucking angry and loud, and resentful and when I hate everything about myself and when I don’t want to be fucking Black and proud, Nefertiti. And you know what? maybe your trauma doesn't show through skin bleached raw, but it manifests through your desertion from the rest of our realities which you’ve chosen to ignore.”
The clock above the kitchen sink begins to tick backwards, slowly, as waves pulling back and out towards the horizon. Time prepared for its collapse and resurgence all in the moments between my sisters’ grasps at the right to pain and anger. This yearning sunk us deep beneath the kitchen floor, jutting us out into the river of my dreams.
“I had a dream last night, one I hadn’t seen before. It scared me, made me think of home. Made me think of the two of you and of our mother, made me think of father and freedom, and baby coils, and ancestors, and womanhood, and blackness, and God, and it went like this:
This dream begins with the bodies of our people.
As the wind pulls skin, the hue of mercury, back into the shadows of West Africa,
We battle the sun until it's eyes, bloodshot, ram into the western edge of humanity
Setting there for eternity.
Leaving the trace of our people forever lost to a blackened sea;
Reclaiming the souls of our ancestors trapped in vitriolic soil
This is how we’ll lose them
Together
We'll Throw them away to the tides
And listen carefully, sisters
as the current erases the words that came after no.
Erases the world born against womanhood
Until it feels like we’ve finally found control
And I can make the blood run faster
Until it feels like he was never there
Until the nightmares are no longer traumas reincarnated
Until the moon becomes our dawn.
Carving our figures out with the blunt of our teeth
I can rewrite this reality and make it disappear
So that Eve can choose freedom
So that beauty is redefined.
So that we look for ourselves before finding God
So that daughters are not shaped by the tongues of their fathers
So that mothers can be human
And nature will be nature.
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love
You won’t be able to see beyond it
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