The Late Arrival

My husband posted a pic collage on social media a few days back to commemorate Loving Day. Admittedly, I was less than enthusiastic considering, uh I don’t know…EVERYTHING. Yay. Loving Day. That’s when Aunt Mag and Uncle John popped up in my memory.  I grew up seeing their portrait on the family’s upright Mason & Hamlin piano; and, in passing at least once, my mom explained: Who Woulda Thought? That's your Aunt Mag and Uncle John. People said he was an old white man, but no one ever really talked about it. I was young enough to remember that and young enough to be puzzled. IT? What was IT, and why was IT a secret? I moved on from my confusion and, I guess innocence, until about FIVE YEARS AGO when I was introduced to Loving Day , and out of nowhere, the light broke like a two-by-four splintering on my head: OMG, nobody talked about Uncle John being white because his marriage to Aunt Mag was ILLEGAL. Aunt Mag was my grandmother’s aunt. Her family – m y family – survived a triple

It was weeks ago or it ten years ago when I saw a man die. He died on Twitter. He died on Facebook. He died on the nightly news. He died on Instagram. He died again and again and again. I shook my head and sighed deeply in exhaustion. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that Botham Jean , Freddie Gray , Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor were killed? A few days ago that Ernest Lacy , Dontre Hamilton , Daniel Bell were killed?  Maybe it was just a few weeks ago and not nearly 120 years ago that my second great grandfather French, his stepson Pete and nephew Will were lynched . Days, months and years blur together while only the names have changed and the only constant is black bodies.  I file the images and the names and the stories safely away from emotion, yet close enough to vibrate into my daily reality. That reality is the one where I want to go out into the our local hinterlands to buy smoke bombs because they bring me joy; but, instead I know that law enforcement is on high alert