Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

You don’t want your child to think that’s how you treat another person,

kind that draws attention to hisself, talks big about the beating and stabbing and killing they did to get up in a place like that because it makes them feel bigger to be seen. Makes them feel like real men to see fear.

You don’t know the sergeant come from a long line of men bred to treat you like a plowing horse, like a hunting dog—and bred to think he can make you like it.

Ain’t no water to catch the wind and cool you off, so the heat settles and bakes. Like a wet oven.

Growing old with my mouth twisted bitter at the taste of what I’d been accorded in the feast of life: mustard greens and raw persimmons, sharp with unfulfilled promise and loss?

Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look.

This the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout.

There’s no happiness in it, just dry air and hard red clay where grass won’t grow.

Can’t nothing bother me when I got my hands in the dirt,

Ain’t no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that’s going to flush out the truth.

“It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where my family lived… it’s a wall. It’s a hard floor, wood. Then concrete. No opening. No heartbeat. No air.”

it was a sort of home to me: terrible and formative as the iron leash that chains dogs, that drives them to bark hysterically and run in circles and burrow to the roots of the grass, to savage smaller animals, to kill the living things they can reach.