I was twelve that day, and now I’m ninety, but I still see her bare feet, scratched and dusty from being dragged down the road. Those feet dangle among leaves so green they writhe like flames. I stand in the garden. The perfume of gardenias makes me dizzy enough to faint. From where I hang, I see a woman thrown from a ship because her child don’ come. She screams too loud and long. The others lift her over the rail, let her fall. They all touch her. They all say: I’m not the one. I see the mother of my mother, standing naked on a beach. The men look her over, burn a mark on her thigh. She squats in a cage for fifteen days. Flies land on her face. She don’ swat them away. I see the bodies chained in the holds of ships. Each man got less room than he got in the grave. They panic, break their own ankles, smother in their own waste. They jump if they get the chance. Black sea swallow a black man. Nobody stop to find him. On the distant shore, I see a runaway stripped of his own skin like a rabbit, torn limb from limb.
