Hum If You Don't Know the Words

by Bianca Marais

I will never understand why we hold each other in contempt like this, why we are all so scared that one of us will rise above their station when the white man has appointed himself the guardian of making sure that never happens.

I finally understood how fractured I’d become in my quest to be lovable. In trying to be everything each of my parents wanted me to be, I dissected myself to excise the parts that weren’t acceptable. I sloughed off bits of myself—the gangrenous, unlovable aspects of my personality—and like Frankenstein, I built a monster.

We were each alone in the bubble of our grief, and while it’s true that misery loves company, sorrow is not reduced or diminished in any way even when it’s shared.

Children should never see what these children have seen: the darkness in men’s souls, the infinite capacity to hate.

If Jesus were black, surely we, the children of Africa, would not be suffering as much as we are.

Lord, please take this hatred from me. Anger is a self-administered poison and I want no part of its contagion.

I wonder if that cut of the cord that so decisively separates mother from child is nature’s way of reminding us that we are no longer of one body and must start learning the process of letting go. If so, does any mother ever truly learn how?

Sinners have more forgiving ears than saints.”

I didn’t have the words then to articulate what I was feeling, but on some level I’d understood that tears are neither black nor white; they are the quicksilver of our emotional turmoil and their salt flavors our pain equally.