sugar

last april i learned my ancestors owned a plantation called “free and easy,” in eastern north carolina close to swamp lands where their slaves waded through the hot, dark muck to execute trade of grains and crops onto large boats coming from other countries i was horrified, the entire evidence of it and then the name and began to question my dressing which had twice in one week been liked to “southern belle” because i thought of the women on that land, i don’t know their names, drinking mint juleps and shooting commands my dad showed me a sugar bowl left behind from the place that has since been rendered a hunting club but maintains the same name it is china white with cheerful flowers painted around its waist and i tell him i will take it to the field and do some sort of ancestral spell, weep and weep in sorrow do my best to shed from my own skin the violence of my predecessors how to say i am sorry again and again for my kin those whose blood streams into my own their stories and actions and repressions and abuse and desires my mind wove a fantasy, one of the women in my lineage falling in love with one of the other women meant to be her maid i don’t want to make light of an entire epoch of bloodshed and murder and every other heinous thing that could be funnelled into the domain of humanity and yet i dreamed that some other story laid within the hate two nights ago was a full moon in cancer, domain of the heart and home and emotions i was weeping for days and bleeding too having sex and then sleeping, dreams filled with planes. 

the answer is: i am trying every day. the answer is: i am kind as i can be. the answer is: i am praying, and thanking and tilling the soil that has poisoned my roots so that the next set of shoots may come up clean and sweet i will read all the academic texts i bought about women on plantations, the racial relations between, indoors, outdoors, i will dance and see what i can learn from impulses that come a thousand layers beyond my conscious knowing i will be honest about where i come from and in that also claim the contrast in conjunction with accountability, i am not killing, i am not without conscience, my motives are to overturn, i work hard so does everybody else and goddess knows we need a nap.