Daughters of Black mothers, can we talk? Name the things we don’t know how to say; how we fear that our disclosures will heap the world of shame and scandal on their heads -  how we know they too have been weighted down by this unbearable burden. When we tell our stories, can we use ellipses to represent the times they knew but we would not say,  because their lives and reputations were ours to protect? We walk into rooms, classrooms, meeting places, courtrooms convulsing from the venom still coursing through our veins and we tell the world about the plight and the plunder of our bodies and our lands. We leave them out, leave them in the safety of our hearts, the shackled pharynx refusing to spit their names. That time they bathed us with that green bush, warned us about the bellies that could not bear the family name, his name which is also our name. If we could rest a little knowing as their seeds we are protected, as their daughters, we are cherished-  maybe we could tell the full story of how it all happened. Because it happened, happens, happening more often without their consent. My dear, I know we don’t want to talk about it, we can't call them sinners- afraid of how that marks us because we are nourished by that same milk, graded by the same rubric - we are all daughters.  But,  could we call it what it is for the first time knowing nobody will like it? we generally cant countenance the truth. Their stains haven’t gone away, have they? Years waiting to forget the past so badly but that memory might be the thing that helps us to pluck out the root. Our mothers, or the memory of our still so soft skin? Our mothers, or the memory of the innocent childlike grin? Milk still on our breath, buds of hair barely sprouting in our sacred places; expected to have the strength to bend the violence of his will. And we don’t blame them for never coming to our rescue, we know their own fight, the silence of their own mothers and grandmothers, how they buckled under the arch of St Patrick. Still, can we talk about our mothers who walked with their eyes closed, backs turned to us and arms stretched out to him? What can we tell them about our lives? We learned secrecy and silence and to never speak the full truth- we carry that in different places, spaces, muzzling, blindfolding falling into the traps, this unrelenting maze of people wielding power they pretend to have never amassed. I have been thinking about us for a while, but maybe five mothers had to beat a young girl unconscious in the streets first before we could get together and ask them to really look at what they have done. 
 

R. Alexia McFee