6. some of us never went missing

I know so little

places and dates, births and deaths, names 

that you were a dressmaker, free, 15 years before emancipation 

I know a clutter of last names of those 
who owned you and your kin, 

city addresses, where you and your 6
children lived and worked

and land, deeded and divided generation after generation, as your people were, 

the uneasy earthen cradle of your ancestral memory is now submerged in ‘south Carolina’s inland sea’, a hydroelectric project forming one of the largest human made lakes

one plantation house still stands, on the lake’s edge, a favorite destination of a group of Charleston ghost hunters for the tenacity of its super natural communication  

I know the name of a school your children 
attended, called ‘the only institution in the 
south at that time preparing promising blacks for college’

I know the last name you gave your children, with a story about a fresh Scottish immigrant father who died poor, in china, no explanation of the funds for your children’s expensive education… only the hard to ignore resemblance between the father line on all six birth certificates and a brother of the mayor of Charleston at that time, your second son, also shared his first name, the strand in our blood helix linking me to you

I have so many questions, about the white father of your brown babies, whoever he was, if it was complicated, or simply survival

about the teachers labeling your children ‘promising’, if the fault of assimilation broke long before placed on their shoulders 

I wonder if someone did their best to protect you when you were small, if your heart kept the kind of blazing love that lives under fire, mixed in whatever salt of betrayals you must have endured

I want to know your smile, what pulled it from the stone of your circumstances into the cracked light of your lips, if you managed kindness for yourself while still robed in a body, if you ever rested, fully, before returning your skin to the soil, if you’ve found enough kindness now to rock all the mines of cruelty you must have walked though into relief 

I look for you, in my father, in my grandfather, but your face feels lost in theirs, even if we all tell the truth, now, that you are our origin, I listen for you in my face but it leaves me wondering if I do it for the right reasons

but I know there is a story of how we arrived at a nightly ritual of sitting around a dinner table with so little to say to each other 

a story that does not live in pretending we are only descended from a choice to leave Europe 

I learned a new word for you, instead of great great great grandmother which is always a mouthful, I can call you my third great grandma 

I know most of your children left, my 2nd great grandpa left with his new wife and baby and never spoke to you again, they moved to Massachusetts, passed for white and severed all ties with the people they came from 

I want to know if you missed him horribly, or understood, or both, people in our family seem to leave each other so easily now

my father says he knew nothing about you, when he found out in his forties, he also says he wasn’t surprised, a limbo between knowing and not, a silence never fully digested inflaming the pathways to curiosity

I wonder if you knew while alive that your 2nd son made a living as a photographer, that he and his wife and his children were safe, and provided for

recently I found an aging photo album of your grandson (my great grandpa) Ralph, traveling in California for a summer in his 20’s, posing with friends in fresh dapper suits, lunching in parks and wandering beautiful spots on the coastline, he took, developed and hand captioned each photo, (often mentioning his fondness for one particular companion), the light in his eyes looks bold and erupting 

I’d only ever heard of him as husband and father, working til old age when he suffered badly with Parkinson’s, my dad once drew him in his wheel chair, the pain in his face climbing the page

my dad spent his early 20s in art school, drawing, photographing, printing, etching, carving enough exhale to push upright against a weathered insistence of the senselessness of his efforts to feel something, to feel seen, to consider himself a source of beauty, but he threw his incomplete final project off the roof of his college’s main building. 

I have so many questions I don’t know who or how to ask, about what tangles in my throat, in my cramped legs and stiff fingers, I wonder if you understand, if you know something of the way out from here