River Sing Me Home

by Eleanor Shearer

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”

When the hurricanes came, they ripped up even the sturdiest trees; and when the white men came, they tore children out of their mothers’ arms. And so, we learned to live without hope. For us, loss was the only thing that was certain.

Without roots, things die. Many of us did die, at the hands of the white men or in the heat of the midday sun. The soil ran rich with our blood, and the roots fed on our bodies. It made the roots strong. Shallow, but strong. There was hope for this new world, after all.

Was this freedom? A violent rupture, a body driven to flight, a mind paralyzed with horror as it watched things unfold beyond its control?

There was freedom in this new kind of smallness, an exhilarating sense that she was in the world, and not just passing through it at a white man’s pace.

“The connection between all things. That we can’t just take; we must also give.” Mama B, too, touched the place on the tree where the bark had been peeled away. “All healing start from there.”

“We all got our gifts—the things we see that others can’t. All we can do is use them when the time come.”

This was the real power of slavery, the long shadow it could cast after its formal end—that even with all this distance between her and Providence, Rachel still lived in fear.

With a sense of wonder, she had imagined herself as the daring protagonist of her own myth, her own life. This wonder had faded with age, and she had thought it extinguished until now. Was Rachel afraid to paddle the length of an unknown river and face its monsters and its terrors? Yes. But below the fear was a thrill at the thought of plunging into the wilderness.

So there was something about the passing of a parent. A cosmic weight that shifted onto the generation below. A child could leave the world without a whisper, but a parent’s death made itself known.

Her chest unknotted, releasing the ache it had held there since the first loss—since Micah, maybe even since her forgotten mother. It was not completeness that she felt, because her heart bore all the scars of the dead, and the ones left hundreds of miles away. But it was the closest thing to completeness she had ever known. It was acceptance. It was peace.

The baby was a stranger, without speech, unknowable. It would be years before he could say what was on his mind. And yet, love did not wait. Love was there in the beginning—even before the beginning. Love needed no words, no introduction. Existence was enough.

This is how we are remembered. In snatches of song, in dreams, in the smile that passes between mother and child. These are the parts of us that cannot be destroyed. These are the parts of us that feed the roots, and keep them strong.