The Blueprint

by Rae Giana Rashad

The men tell the sun this is their world, then they close their eyes and do it all over again like their great-grandfathers.”

“May not need it now, but you will. If you have his child, no matter what you do, you’ll be stuck.”

Where did these men come from? he asked his nurse. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Nobody knows, she said. They came from nowhere. But that wasn’t true. They were military officers, police officers, senators, governors, a World War II veteran like Bastien’s grandfather.

“If they’re just words and drawings like you say, why are you hiding it from me?” “Because you take everything even though you have everything,” I said, weeping. “Nothing is ever mine.”

You have this way of seeing things in people and making them feel bigger than they are. A mercy or a curse. That’s what the official saw in you.”

“I was sixteen.” “You should’ve known better.” “At what point can we be children? Why do we always have to know better? We were taught that this was our way out. He was my way out. I knew nothing else.”

“Bastien owes me my freedom. I gave him everything,” I said. “What more does he want?” Dalena ground out her cigarette on her chair’s arm. “He doesn’t want to lose.”

The best way to love someone is to want a beautiful life for them, however they find it.”

“My mama has her bill of sale. They sold her as a fancy girl. The man who enslaved her paid five times what he paid for a field hand at that same auction.”

“You can’t own a sunset,” I said, yawning. “It wasn’t meant to be owned.” “I’m not a man, dodo bird. I know that.” She draped an arm over me protectively. We slept.

A buried woman doesn’t speak. She doesn’t breathe. She wonders how she lay so quiet and still when the first shovel of dirt rained upon her.

I hid that journal behind the portrait of Jefferson in our bedroom, so when I looked into his accusatory eyes, I would be reminded one day when I was stronger and wiser, I would have what he denied Sally for forty years.

“Your grandparents moved to Detroit to escape the Klan,” I said, looking at Julian’s hardened profile. “You think they’d be proud of you right now?” The men moved in sync, pulling once on the cuff of their shirts, ensuring it was perfect. “I don’t think anyone could fault a man for doing his job.”

Tightened the chains. Called it love. For four years, he said he loved me, but he never said he trusted me.

“You said you know how it ends.” We were eye to eye in the dark. “I didn’t say I’d tell you.”

Be loud. If you make yourself too small and soft, you would slip your own chains around your wrists without noticing.

She grasped his hand. “My name is Kumba.”