When the Reckoning Comes

by LaTanya McQueen

They’d always known their weapons were their bodies.

The path to resistance was through what their bodies could do,

They prayed to a god now told was theirs, but they understood that even this god knew the morality behind keeping someone in chains.

The students at her school were filled with the same resigned anguish for a system designed to break them before they’d barely begun their lives.

It had not been lost on her that most of these jobs were service ones, and most of the people who’d taken them were black. And the visitors were mostly white; it was all haunting in its history.

They’d never yessir and mistah their way to freedom. Even prayer may have once given hope, but they understood hope was a thing to take. No one would give it. Not someday, not ever, so they would make their someday now. It was time to make it and be free. No one else was going to save them. They were the ones. Always had been and always would be. They were the ones who must save themselves.

Mira saw the history of her people, of this country, of all the violence forgotten and ignored. It was here again. No, it was always here. 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.