The Children
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I tried to remember him. His image in my mind was of a bouncing ball of Black joy on his mother’s hip;
Waiting to be handed off to “aunties,” singing in choirs with a babbling coo, and interrupting “the adults” with joy
Unraveling the thickening air of culture and tradition clashing with America
Innocence disrupting systems, though we understood neither, his instruments were unawareness and abandon.
His small hands folded over complexion after complexion, soiled with the sweat of perfume, cologne, old Bibles, peppermints, and an audience ripe for good distraction — amen.
He pattered his arms like drumsticks in the lap of his mother, finding rhythm in praise and lullaby in worship.
There he is. His smile. His sisters flowing over, perfected ribbon and clip in hair, to usher him back to a pew, a home for the remaining hours barracaded by elders and ushers, parents in waiting. His brothers focused intently on being engineers of a holier agenda.
He was safe.
I found him, there, in my memory and remembered how seemingly everything about small children were round: their bottoms, their heads, their eyes, their puckering lips, and the world around them.
Their smells, soft.
Their commands for attention, royal.
Us, subjects — responsible for protecting the treasures they sensed they were.
When do they stop being round headed, round-eyed reminders in need of correction and protection?
When does it not bother us that we will no longer see them dance, or smile, sing, or run recklessly into life?
How are we so powerful? Far along? And yet we cannot, like religion, find power in all our rules and systems. How do we draw power from our nature and the world around us if our nature is fear?
How are we not hollowed when we lose our seeds? Our core? Fruitless.
Things without cores become less and then nothing at all.
Let us mourn who we are.
Women with shaved heads mourning in black, mourning in Black.
“What is hair without joy?”
“What is joy?” …without the bouncing ball, drumstick arms, wide and round everything like a ready seed.
Where are our fathers?
Shattering in a place foreign to them because the world does not allow them the strength to visit grief. To be protected.
And we. We are weaving complexities of modernity around the simplest commandment: love.
Beneath the weave,
Pulling apart the strings of being colored, cocooned in prayers —
we try and hide our children from lwa, brushing away 232 colors of judgement from their faces like crumbs from millet, kissing their flesh with a story to soothe our truth: that we cannot hide their shine for our fear — knowing that God, by any name, cannot be served by a lamp beneath a basket.
Yet from our earth, their light spills from beneath a grassy knoll, a high hill, and we are fighting for the cities where they dwell, in hopes that as they live and live more abundantly, they would shine. And shine bright.
Burn the darkness.
Mark it.
Mar it.
Exorcise it.
Swallow it in their bright.
Yet as they take their lamps and venture out of sight, we call their names but I am fighting to remember their smiles?
For Thalmon Silien
You can support his memory by donating at https://gofund.me/c4446293.
— ruthnie angrand
