Here's a Truth

Now that she is older,
climbing up the family tree
with withered, failing hands,

my mother passes down
ghost stories, caressing fallen
branches on their birthdays.

All my ancestors are heroes—

soldiers,
mothers,
orphans.

All met their trials with heads high,
posed for cloudy photos that trace
my smile through generations.

I wish
I had asked
more questions, she mourns.

She writes down what myths
she remembers, fills their gaps
with what she calls love.

*

I do not ask about the people I come from.
I am afraid of what they did,
who they owned.

I take comfort in those too poor
for dirt, how it clears them
of some sins.

I take comfort knowing some
settled here long after the war,
their guilt a world away,

buried in earth I never claimed—
a home no one asks me
to account for.

*

My mother is afraid
of forgetting.

My mother is afraid
of being
forgotten.

*

On Great-Grandaddy’s birthday,
we hear his story.
I know how it will go.

Humble Beginnings:

same as most
who depended on heat and rain
to harvest a living

Overcoming:

fought his way
through med school, made something
of himself, made something of his children

The Man She Knew:

wore his suit on the tractor,
feared germs,
loved his family and professional wrestling

But this year brings a new epilogue:

Great-Grandaddy signed death
certificates for prisoners
ill or executed.

One night he led his daughter
to the gallows, made her witness
his signature and the hanged Black man.

Here’s a truth, he said.
This man died
for a white man’s crimes.

His descendants take pride in the story—
proof that he was a good man,
that we are good people.

*

On her birthday, my mother asks if
she has been good to me. She is
asking which stories I will tell.

I say she’s a good mom
and wait for the next question:
Can you forgive the bad parts?

By which she means

forget.

*

Delivered in the same room
in country where horse breeding
outpaced man’s,

my parents were no strangers.
My mother’s maiden name
haunts every graveyard, same

with Grandma’s a few counties over.
Families moved up in the world,
but not far.

The math’s easy in a place so small.

Say the story is true,
that I come from blameless, healing hands
grieved by the paper they signed.

It is just as likely I come from the hands
that grabbed the nearest Black man
or tied his noose or hid the guilty face.

I will not hear those stories.
I will not hear the dead man’s story—

not even his name.

*

My bloodline runs
the border of brothers
at war.

Cut me open,
and I expect I’d split
right down the middle,

spilled on both sides.

*

My mother has not told her children
what we will inherit
when her birthdays run out.

If I say I don’t want land or fortune,
she will call me
ungrateful.

I say nothing,
ask nothing.

The word for this is
coward.

*

When my sister says,
Black men die for white men’s crimes,
she is no hero.

Where do they hear this stuff?
the family asks, pressing
white roses in the yellowed Bible.

Its crimson leather cracks,
my great-grandfather’s name
worn

to nothing.

*

If I took you to my grandparents’ farm,
surely you’d feel it
when I held your hand

against the barn’s soft wood—
you’d feel that hardness underneath.
Yes, there: love like a mother’s

shattered bones—

sharp enough
to break you.

*

Another story, left untold:

By the end,
Great-Grandaddy forgot
everything.

He held his wife
at gunpoint, life’s love miraged
to deadly stranger.

She stayed with him—
the man she still called Doctor,
the man she remembered.

Who else
would tell him who he’d been
on his birthday?

Who else
would even believe it?

Whitney Rio-Ross