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How long, did you think, after all of this, it would be before their souls finally came for you in the night?
A person moved through the world with no knowledge and no assurances, only hope and faith to guide them through the belief they were making the right decisions.
Mira knew what her mother meant, as if that was all it would take to alter her life’s trajectory, as if as long as she did these things—lived a life of yes and no ma’am pleasantries, of never speaking beyond the answer to a question, of being watchful of her tone, even when upset, of never asking, never challenging, of being polite, respectable—somehow, in some way, she would be saved.
Every day the world reminded him, both directly and subtly, that because he was black his life held different rules, and Jesse behaved the way he did in defiance of this reality.
what Mira learned that day was how easy it was to let someone convince you of their truth instead of believing in your own.
To believe, one must care, and who’s to say anyone ever cared? That’s what her mother had tried to tell her. That’s what she’d tried to make her see. Who was to say anyone ever cared—for Jesse, for her, for any of the black kids like them? Who’s to say anyone ever cared at all?
Who could look at this and not see it for what it was? To not see the slave system the cabin represented? Instead of a slave cabin they saw a modest-looking room they could have lived in and ignored the truth. None of them wanted to see anything else because the narrative that had been created affirmed whatever falsehoods people wanted to believe.
To marvel at the twisted limbs of the surrounding trees, their branches climbing toward the sky, toward their heaven, and not see lynching trees.
She felt shame for participating, for coming and being complicit. She felt shame for the circumstances that had led to a place like this existing. Shame for the realization that even after all these years of progress, this was where we’d come, to this corrupted version of the past we all thought we’d left behind.
memory can shift in its recalling, making the past become not what one remembers but what one believes.
She’d lived in the false promise that because she was invisible, she’d be spared, and while she knew now this was a lie, she stayed
How much over the years had she let her mother’s judgments affect how she too saw the world? How she saw herself?
but she saw that they were the devils, the murderers, the true thieves in the night. How many communities had men like these destroyed to rubble, leaving only ash from the burning wreckage as it billowed toward the sky? They escaped to their untouched homes while black people were rounded up on the streets and locked away.
What she saw before her could have been this year or last, ten years ago or a hundred. The scene was the same, the story the same, and she knew its ending.
