02
The Photographs Belong to the Family
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we are all the same.
slow, warm, eager
we are all the same.
Summer’s evening spent lying in the grass, staring between the clouds, making out the shapes in the sky. Now I know why it’s so hard to think of the words. slow, warm, eager. My mind weaves around others’ conversations, listening to ways we categorize time. Leaning across the blanket, I find the book that urges me to come alive. The author’s words somehow reach beyond what I know, only to reveal the parts of me that existed before. To feel seen. To gain footing. A joy that I’ve found when words meet paper. When words meet a simple truth.
I.
We used to like when the days were long, the nights cool. We used to see the bugs in the sidewalk cracks and follow them home. We follow until our knees scrape the ground and our blood mixes with the pavement.
We have that tree swing in the front yard you love so much. I watch as your mom’s car pulls up to drop you off for our sleepover. I found the box we buried beside the bush near the steps. I hope I get to see you tomorrow.
Hurry! Run into the middle of the road before the next car comes. We pretend to know ballet, balancing on yellow lines in between here and now, now and then. Crickets sing to us and we forget how our parents tell us never to do this. Nothing feels like this. Nothing feels like this. July wants us to feel this forever.
We’re quick to grow up now all we can do is run back home.
instrumentals/an interlude
wind chimes remind me
Maybe one day it’ll make sense to move back. Helicopters pass over me as I lay in the clearing by my family’s house (a place that doesn’t exist). I wonder where they’re going. I steal a blackberry off December’s napkin, they’re her favorite. She laughs at something in the wind as my brother reties her laces, and she runs off.
My brother became a father at 19 years old. He turns and I see it now. His face holds the relic of a soft smile and breathless laugh. His reluctance to responsibility has changed. Instead, ceaseless security and unabating love have taken shape.
The ground beneath us maintains; when he shifts, I shift. We catch up like we used to after school on the drive back home. Here and now, we’re different. We’re not in high school anymore and we don’t see each other every day. He shifts, I shift.
The heat we once knew is getting hotter. Predictions say it’ll rain all week. When the temperatures rise, you start to miss. Your mind drifts to the times you allowed the heat to make your decisions. Sinking within the earth, trading places in the soil, praying to be swallowed up as your fingers interlocked. Knowing we’re always together, rooted in memories. We grow to give and take, give and take. The earth still knows you. The earth still remembers us. The ground wonders where we went.
There’s stillness in the open water. My friends and I rent kayaks and canoes at Carvin’s Cove. We go as far as we can until we find the hidden alcove where we swim without the lifeguards seeing us. We begin to drift together, our bodies sliding between spring and summer. There’s no fear of a current ready to take us away. We stay here and only here. Bodies of water I swim in only when I come home. The city doesn’t have open water like this. The way the river meets the rocks, lapping slowly. No rush. No skyline just beyond the shore, reminding us of our expiration.
Here, we are timeless.
We exist here and only here. I don’t want to imagine a summer when I don’t visit.
When do we get to go home?
Will it ever be like this again?
My memory of it changes every time I remember.
II.
my mother as a narrator/
her gaze upending my understanding of blackness
Posing us in front of abandoned structures and overgrown landscapes, we exist in totally different worlds. The black and white beautifully glows in each frame—something I try to reimagine now.
Her Holga sits in my college dorm. Returning to her gaze, I meet her with mine.
I look through old images of myself or my family, reminded of moments I no longer know. A film plays through my mind, rather a retelling than a recollection.
Further, I’m met with a realization that my mother took every photograph—the clue being her absence in the photos.
A mother who exists outside the frame simultaneously carries the weight of all of our memories.
The couch with the spiral in the armrest, the brown stitch lining. From the corner peaking through, I recognize an animal print pillow; she still has a few downstairs. My brother's truck rests on the side of the couch, probably only for a moment. “Put your toys down while we take a picture with Grandmommy”
Kendrick speaks just as mom takes the picture. My hand reaches up—a reaction to the flash. My grandmother holds us still. Her natural hair, free behind her headband, curls just like mine does now.
When I was younger, family friends would gasp and applaud my posture even when my round belly peeked out beneath my T-shirt.
“What a smile she has!”
I stood tall and smiled wide, lips never touching.
The gap in my teeth is coming back.
The ocean’s horizon splits the frame of an image she took. My brother works to fill a green bucket with sand. Beside him, I stand in pink pants and short curls. I appear to be doing something yet nothing at all.
The blues in the photograph remind me of my first home. Edgerton. We lived here for a handful of years before the 2008 Recession. The river by Edgerton would flood every time it rained. The water flowing over Bennington St. SE. My brother lives over there now with his baby. I wonder if she ever plays in the water like I did. I wonder if she’s growing up like us.
III.
shine your light on the world //
shine your light for the world to see
My father introduced it to me.
I found it in the CD binders that scattered the floorboards of my dad’s old Chevy Malibu. It was in the music he’d play when he’d drive me home: UMI Says by Mos Def, Prototype by OutKast, and a song I only remember by the lyrics mentioning something about a radio and roses.
I found it when I met my best friend in kindergarten; her name was Grace. She had these colorful beads at the bottom of her braids that made a noise every time she turned her head.
We found it in the box TV hanging in the corner of our classroom when we watched Obama’s inauguration. A time for vivid and undeniable hope.
we’ll tiptoe to the sun
We see it in the constellations when there’s no light pollution.
Sometimes, I still find myself recognizing it, realizing how it fits within me differently.
body doubling/doubling consciousness/unconscious in how I change/change my posture when someone speaks my name/name being interchangeable with treatment/treatment for my father; his name (Jason)/“Jason” to employers means he’d show up on time/time to be presentable/representing a man they’ve never met before/before they interview him they place his application in the maybe pile/piling onto his opportunities/opportunities my grandmother gave him to live/living as a way of serving/serving as a way of surrendering/surrender and you won’t be surprised
My mother burns and freckles under the sun — as the heat thickens. Her complexion still reveals to me attributes I do not possess. I twist until my melanin bruises, and I’m reminded: so much of me is made up of her.
I never met myself as a child. The blackness in me largely unconsidered. It’s not that I believed I was white, I simply didn’t acknowledge how my skin discolored and how my hair grew straight to the sun. My grandmother turns to face me, reminding me:
“Sit up straight, girl. Show them who you are.”
“Sista girl; how you doing, sista girl?”
“Be Grandmommy.”
“Kisses. Kisses. Kisses. Hug!”
My grandmother met herself as a child. She knew she was black the first time she saw her hands, outstretched to the woman she loved, Iva. She became exactly who she needed to be—uprooting those around her to meet her as she was and accept her how she is.
I trip as I try to keep up, running behind her, mirroring her. I apply the same shade of red—the one that leaves a stain on every glass that touches my lips. So much of me is made up of her.
In all the ways I’ve changed, you have too. A beautiful and prevenient grief it is to never feel full in the places we considered home. My nails, chipped and cherry red, scratch at the pages. I massage until the words disappear, leaving only the indents of my fear. I still feel impressions on my skin. My impatience reflects in how quickly I pluck blades of grass. One, two three-
The worlds we travel to. The places we go.
My grandmother says her age is showing. She catches herself being undoubtedly convinced of things that aren’t true — she remembers vividly events that didn’t occur. How do you tell her your arms can’t stretch wide enough to hold this grief? Looking at her, I notice how the sun radiates over her blush. Anticipation. I keep anticipating. The skin around her eyes would never reveal such forgetfulness. You wish to touch her face, to hold her here only for a little while. You reach, and she extends.
And suddenly, the grass grows past my knees, and the wind carries it all away.
Unofficial Sources of Inspiration:
Open Water by Caleb Nelson
We Are All From Somewhere Else by Ruth Padel
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Du Bois
In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self by Mariana Ortega
Moonlight written and directed by Barry Jenkins
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below by OutKast (song: Prototype)
Black on Both Sides by Mos Def (song: UMI Says)
The sound system in my brother’s old Toyota Corolla
The cicadas in my backyard
Photographs taken by my mother
Stories told by my grandmother
Forgetfulness inherited from my father
My inability to stay on topic
The house on Merriman Road
(more specifically: 5834 Merriman Road, Roanoke, VA, 24018)
The house on Whitehall Circle
(more specifically: 4216 Whitehall Circle, Roanoke, VA, 24018)
Carvins Cove off I-81
Grass
The sun