Dear Girl

A Guyanese family begins and ends with a mother. Tenement yard mother. Coolie mother. Negro mother. Mother who cooks. Mother who cleans. Mother who bathes her brown little children. She lathers their hair with a cake of Blue Soap, fingernails digging into scalps, scrubbing away days of lice, sun, and dirt. Mother never recoils. Her children can never be so dirty in her eyes. Mother empties the poseys of worms that pass through their infected bodies. She says, bend yahself as she cleans them, so that their hands never touch their body’s own waste. Under the wire lines — with…