by Cynthia Robinson Young
-for Ahmaud Arbery, and all the Black sons whose names we’ll never know
1.
You can still see slavery when you shield your eyes
and look back at the not-so-distant past.
People who knew your people
have not been dead that long. You can still go back
and walk where your grandmother’s grandmother walked.
There are plantations with slave shacks
still standing as a reminder. The town your granny talked about,
as if she made up the place where she lived
as a child in Damascus, is still there.
Every horrific tale she told you is whispered there
still, among the trees that are still standing,
living witnesses of her truth.
And if she could return, she would be able to see
her stories resurrect themselves, ghostly tales
lying in wait for her return, frightful reenactments
that would chase her back away from Georgia again
before they reclaimed her life
and buried her.
It doesn’t matter what Damascus has become.
In your granny’s memory, the old town
she lived in, the way it was in 1918, is still there,
a surrounding of Black folk just like her,
and the white folks they tried to, for safety’s sake,
stay invisible to.
2.
That her grandsons, so many times removed,
would possess the same fear, would be obsessed
with the same mission—to stay safe,
might have discouraged her from even migrating?
Would this knowledge have alerted her to
the lie that she could escape this darkness?
That the evil of the human heart
would also follow the North Star,
would listen to the sound of the river?
It is not a good thing to realize
you have no super power.
You are not invisible.
You are just biding time, riding
on a train
in the Twilight Zone,
passing southern towns and northern cities,
cotton plantations and high-rise Projects,
still migrating, still
searching for
that elusive
safe space.
Cynthia Robinson Young is a native of Newark, New Jersey, but now lives and writes in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She is the author of the chapbook, Migration (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in journals and magazines including Grist, Freedom Fiction, Rigorous, The Halcyone, and The Writer’s Chronicle.
Emerge Literary Journal 