Corona Diaries: It's A Lot and Evergreen

When I came back from our family trip to Pierce City, Missouri a few years ago, my dear friend wanted to know all the details. We met for lunch and I told her that, yes, my daughter, my husband and I stood at the graveside of my third-great grandmother who was born in 1795.

That we even took pictures of the expansive greenspace where my second great-grandfather’s house once stood before he and his step-son had a firefight with an angry mob who torched the place with them in it. It’s quiet, pastoral and unassuming.

That we stood on the land my ancestors used to own before they were driven from it.

And that, yes, we held vigil with a small group from the community on the very ground where an ancestor was lynched that night in 1901.

You should really write a book about this, she nudged. Maybe if I can sort it all out in my head. It’s just a lot. 

I mean, I wished I had a picture taken of my daughter and I by our maternal ancestor’s grave. I can still feel the rugged rock and rough engraving of the inscription as I traced it with my finger, but I wish I had would've had that picture taken, instead of a lonely ancient grave without any living offspring

I wished I could’ve sorted my feelings out in my head and eloquently put them in words, but they seem tangled in my struggle with the indignity of dying an innocent death all those years ago.

That the description of my ancestor’s demeanor who was lynched reminds me of my brother in an acute way. Like, how my mind's eye can see that man as my brother dying a silent, righteously indignant death at the hands of a frothing, willfully ignorant mob.

And how if I talk about any of that piece of the story, I find myself swallowing back a crying lump.

It's a lot.

How I felt privileged that this reporter, who captured the story of my family, continues speaking their names and telling their stories in word and in person. That he was the link to a story about my own family that my family either never talked about or knew about.

It’s a lot.

Here we are two years later, shut up, but maybe not shut up. Wearing masks or not wearing masks. Cell phones recording the Barbecue Bettys who've got law enforcement on speed dial, anti-maskers who believe grocery store staff are the enemy; citizens turned protestors, and a global awakening of sorts to...

...deaths occurring during/or as a result of police intervention.

Covid’s changed a lot of things, but not that.

This year's Democratic Convention scheduled in Milwaukee has gone virtual. So I watched tonight with the windows open, while enjoying a respite from week-long humidity.

I listened to the drumbeat of calls for and promises of equity and racial justice. It is a platform that might’ve spared my ancestors’ lives and set my entire family on a different trajectory way back when.

Then came the virtual roll call vote for nomination. Maybe my penchant for the political comes from my second great-grandfather who was President of the Colored Voters organization. He too was a lynching victim that night.

Anyway, someplace in between Rhode Island’s nomination (including calamari), I thought I heard horns beeping outside. Like, incessantly beeping. And also chanting. A quick check on our neighborhood page confirmed that there was a demonstration happening two blocks away.

They were chanting BLACK LIVES MATTER on this, the one hundred-nineteenth anniversary of a triple lynching in my family and banishment from land that could've been passed down to my generation.

It’s an evergreen chant. A comforting echo through my neighborhood and my heart. And a tragedy that it still has to be said.

It’s a lot.