These Ghosts Are Family

Even though they were just words, they built a world that she couldn’t stop thinking about, that she felt trapped inside every night.

Did all white people secretly have some strange antebellum or colonial fantasy? Was there a part of her that would have gotten off on the idea of being a mistress of a big house? If she were alive back then, would she have gone along with it or would she have been brave enough to resist? Would she have married someone who owned slaves?

She had been running away from her mother her whole life, and in the end it was her mother who left her.

As she held on to the struggling woman, Irene latched on to a theory for why the old lady wanted to erase herself so desperately, why she needed to pretend to be somebody else. In this life, she would always be the woman who went to take a phone call for five minutes at a pool party and let her little girl drown in a swimming pool. Those five minutes would be the entire duration of her real life.

It was because of people like him that we’d had to leave in the first place, abandoning our education, our almost-white, brown, and high-yellow privilege, and spend all of our money on visas and plane tickets and American clothes, and now we were nothing. The next day we’d go back to our real lives in New York, Miami, Toronto, London. We blamed the yard boy for that too. Over foreign, we were the Bernards—we were the underclass; we were home health aides, janitors, and nannies. We would think of him and spit the next time we helped elderly women wipe themselves over toilets. We would think that it was all his fault. If people like him would have stayed in their place, then we could have stayed too.

They had not intended to bite him, but they decided that this man needed to learn that sometimes a little fear can help keep men alive too.

Death is just one long therapy session. You have gone over every second of your life and divided them into the misery you caused and the misery others caused you. You have been waiting for six years for this motherfucker to die, and you know that the day has finally arrived.

I had thought the Christmas Rebellion an act of treason; now I saw that for those in bondage, violence was the only choice.

She had changed the course of my life in a way that was irrevocable, yet she was going off to England to forget this place. I could see how easy it was for them to slip into new lives, shed their skin and grow new ones like snakes

But here come these people, the Rastas like the one who held her up now, who believe that Ethiopia is the true Holy Land and that Haile Selassie is the living God. Decrying the very foundation of their colonial education, preaching instead that whites are the ones who are inferior and wicked. Embracing her blackness had become unnatural to Patricia, and subsequently to Vera, but she wondered now why it seemed more natural to put lye acid on the roots of her hair than to let it grow the way she was born. She understood why her mother carried on so when she saw Rastas walking the same streets as her, why she sometimes would call the police if she saw one near their house. They were manifestations of a truth she didn’t want to face, and believed that if scorned enough could be permanently banished. Her mother didn’t want to hear that more of her ancestors came from Africa than from England. That she was idolizing and mimicking the masters who raped and beat her foremothers and forefathers. That slavery was not over, and they’d never truly be free unless they rejected everything they’d been taught to value. Even the white Jesus she worshipped so feverishly. That woman would never embrace Haile Selassie, a god who looked like them, when she was taught that blackness was the opposite of everything divine.

If Abel does not perform his fair share of sacrifice, he knows their marriage will end. Lately he’s been worrying that she wants him to die, to get killed on duty, just to spare herself the embarrassment of divorce. Why else would she insist he keep a job so dangerous?

She does not have to wait for a man to find himself or his courage.