Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

“Any dog give birth like that is less strong after. Even if you don’t think it. Take a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female.” Finally Manny glances at me. It slides over me like I’m glass. Skeetah laughs. It sounds as if it’s hacking its way out of him. “You serious? That’s when they come into they strength. They got something to protect.” He glances at me, too, but I feel it even after he looks away. “That’s power.”

“To give life”—Skeetah bends down to China, feels her from neck to jaw, caresses her face like he would kiss her; she flashes her tongue—“is to know what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love.”

I lie awake and cannot see anything but that baby, the baby I have formed whole in my head, a black Athena, who reaches for me. Who gives me that name as if it is mine: Mama.

suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.