Jackal

by Erin E. Adams

Danger didn’t need a place to hide, it preferred to fester. First it would smile and bring you German chocolate cake. Then it would wait out in the open on your front porch until it felt good and ready.

Danger for Black girls was different. It didn’t obey the boundaries of stories. For them, it was always real.

As a kid, Melissa shielded herself from racism the way most white people did. She held on to a well-rehearsed lesson from after-school specials in the 1990s: I don’t see color. Mel would say that instead, she saw me. Teenage Liz loved that. From what Caroline said last night, Mel is still avoiding the truth: Being blind to color only makes you blind.

She crosses her arms in front of her. Behind her, a massive American flag slouches from the eave of the house. I don’t like thinking about this town and the election. I don’t even talk about this town and the election. When my mom started noting the number of American flags going up in the neighborhood, I got scared.

Myths are as much a part of the slipstream of Black life as joy. Yes, Black folks are masters of joy. Trauma isn’t the only thing carried in DNA. Blackness, like any Golden Fleece, is both a birthright and what lies at the end of a quest.

my mother always identified with her class before her race.

I do know it exists in “the bad part of town.” It’s not “bad” because of anything inherent. The only crime anyone is guilty of is being poor. Not that there aren’t affluent Black people, they just (like myself) keep their distance.

“She says she got a bad feeling in those trees over by the old Rosedale Coke plant. Like she was standing on a grave she knew nothing about. Like something was telling her to get out of the place.”

What is a little erasure if it ensures excellence? It’s just a little bit of yourself. The bit that doesn’t fit.

Everyone thinks they know what my anger looks like. They think it’s screaming and yelling and fighting. Sometimes anger is a low vibration, the coil before the spring. Sometimes it sinks inside me and paralyzes me.

People in America love to believe in freedom, even though it isn’t free. It never was. Not even for those who emblazon it across their cars, patios, and homes. The history of freedom is much older than plastic flags and banners. For those who fled north, the color of their skin united them. Some knew only the plantations they’d been born on, others memorized the trails they’d been traded along. A few even claimed to remember the Passage. All who ran did so in search of freedom. They believed they fled their chains. Some brought new ones with them. Shackled to the god of their captors, they praised him with a faith that was once reserved for deities who looked like them and spoke in their mother tongue. Fueled by impossible belief, an unshakable faith was born. Something novel was needed to survive the New World. I should be sensitive.

One drop in this country is all it takes. Being a Black girl is inhabiting a cruel riddle: Your beauty is denied but replicated. Your sexuality is controlled but desired. You take up too much space, but if you are too small, you are ripped apart. Despite the wash of it, that’s one thing you can always count on whiteness to do: destroy a threat.

The Darkness is not to be feared, for it is full of possibilities.