We skipped a season there y’all, but we still wanted to throw
June 17th is stored in my body’s memory. A ripple in time since 2015, an ancestral moment only realized in retrospect. Charleston, South Carolina. Downtown, the Market where I would’ve been sold to the highest bidder just a handful of generations back. A trial, against a white man I refuse to see even through a screen. Nine months earlier, he’d violated my body and spirit. Nine months after, another one. Sometimes cycles aren’t cute at all. It was my nodal return. The trial took nine hours, which I can hardly remember. Just the sweating, the inability to find my breath, my favorite thai noodles for lunch going untouched. More than anything, stepping out in the sun after it was finally done. Sitting on the sidewalk, doubled over. The tremors running through my body.
I remember wanting to spend that night cozy with friends. One of those friends is engaged now. The other has a baby. (We’re in our nodal reversal now.) I don’t remember if they asked how it went, but i’m sure they did, and i’m sure i didn’t want to talk about it, because i hadn’t learned how to talk about pain yet. Nothing will teach you how to talk about things quite like being forced to speak in great detail of the worst night of your life over and over again. But first, I think you need a moment to mourn having to do that at all. I do remember popcorn and Poussay dying in Orange is the New Black. I remember my friend’s mom telling us not to go back home, because there had been a shooting downtown. June 17th, 2015. An awful day indeed.
Charleston has hyped up the Forgiveness Factor when it comes to that nothing man deciding to murder who are likely the nine most loving people he’d ever met in his entire life in the basement of Ebenezer AME. Does that man deserve forgiveness? Surely not. But deservingness seems to have no place in this time we’re inhabiting. It’s not the law of this land. He justified his murders with the Birth of a Nation-seeded idea that Black men assault “his women.” The IRONY, my friends, is not lost on me at all.
The church sits across from where my sisters and I went to school. Next to the public library where we spent our afternoons. On Calhoun Street, honoring a white supremacist. (Calhoun’s statue has since been taken down, but the street remains his.) A block from Marion Square, named in honor of another white supremacist. We learned about both in school, because the white supremacist government decides what state history is. Ebenezer was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a leader who was executed along with 34 others for planning a liberatory movement for the enslaved, but naturally we learned nothing about that. We learn nothing about the long, disgusting history of white men inflicting sexual violence against Black women with impunity.
In 2015, Juneteenth was but a blip on my radar. Now it marks a moment of reckoning each year. For those who know what it means to reckon at least. These two days happening essentially together, I’m aware of the death, the disrespect, the disregard my people face and how there is little to celebrate in a years-long delay of freedom from enslavement. I think about those who were murdered for attempting to be free. I think about those millions still enslaved across the country. How we’re disappeared in life and death. The lengths we have to go to for anything even resembling justice, decency, or respect. I think about the forgiveness in every breath of a Black American’s life. I think forgiveness requires love, and how our ancestors must pour love into us every day.
That’s what I choose to do with these days moving forward. In the week leading up to the solstice, I will find me soaking in the love from my ancestors. I’ll be dancing and singing with them, praying to them, setting up an altar. Asking them what I should do with their love instead of forgiving those who carry on the legacy of antiBlack violence. There’s liberation in their love, and I will alchemize it with their help. Their love won me that trial in 2015, oh how their spirits line Market Street. I know Clementa, Tywanza, Susie, Myra, Ethel, Depayne, Cynthia, Sharonda, and Daniel were shepherded by the spirits who held them dear.
I think about how I went into that day with dread in my heart, while it’s likely they came into that day with love and left this world before it was through. I slept cuddled with my friends and a weight off my shoulders, a surrender to what came next, unaware that the tragedy that took place hours after and streets over would tether me to that day for years.
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