When the Reckoning Comes

by LaTanya McQueen

Virtue, you preached, came from being beaten. Redemption from blood.

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?

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.

Happiness? What Jesse was doing was surviving and Celine had mistaken that for happiness.

He was tall, almost six feet, but the way he hunched his shoulders made her wonder if at times he felt insecure over his height and the amount of space he took up in the world.

memory can shift in its recalling, making the past become not what one remembers but what one believes.