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Corona Diaries: When the Bough Breaks

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 and possibly afraid and on edge.

Which means I could get pulled over in the smoke bomb hinterlands and become the next black body at most, or thoroughly frustrated at least. So I make an adjustment and don't get my beloved smoke bombs.

Then the adjustments of the past fifty years blur through my memory. Was it a couple years ago when I got pulled over and asked why I was in Hubertus? A few weeks ago when I freaked out when I got lost taking my daughter to a sleepover in another Milwaukee hinterland?

Days ago when I stood over the grave marking my ancestors' lynching?

Today, all the mental files spilled into one another and onto the floor of my mind's eye and into my consciousness.

Today, the bough finally broke.

 
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Comments

  1. ChristineJune 2, 2020 at 7:47 AM

    This platform offers the reaction options "funny, interesting, cool." How short they fall, how short we all fall, how we fall together...there are no words.

    ReplyDelete

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