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”

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.

“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.”

Hope burned with the certainty of youth—of standing on the cusp of adulthood, clear about the path ahead, sure that the world would fall into place accordingly.

In his eyes, the Negro was a brute kept in check only by the wiles of white men like himself, who found ways to control them.

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.

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.