As Good as True

by Cheryl Reid

She gave me advice, how to submit and please him, how to beg, how to save myself. Instead of correcting him, she worked to bend me and to protect her son’s honor.

The wind was dead and the river was still. It looked dark and peaceful, like a sheet of black glass, but lurking beneath the surface was a current, cold and deep, with snakes and tangles of vegetation that could be your end. People could be the same. They could

smile to your face with hatred in their heart while they pulled you down.

“You are an American girl. We are not going back.” With his words, a dark sadness crossed his face and his voice gave away that he missed his homeland. But he had decided what he had in America was more, and because it was more, it was better, and we would sacrifice our past.

For the hope of a better future, Papa assumed his new country’s prejudices,

Loving a child was the most bittersweet joy, maybe the most difficult thing in the world. I wanted to tell her, she could do her best and her child might see it as all wrong. She would know soon enough, this terrible chain of love, from mother to child, how the love was not always returned in the same

If I disappeared it would make no difference in the great scope of things. The idea did not make me sad. I felt calm to know the world was greater than myself.

and I realized one person could be many.

Many people shared the guilt I carried. A history of people made us what we were,

All of us shared responsibility for the bad things that had happened