YOUR FAMILY NAME

Your name. The one that ties you to your people.
I have one. I see it there, in the hundreds of records
my son has put into a growing tree,
looking for his place in it all.
If you are Black in these united states, your family name,
one that may have been assigned or borrowed,
goes back only so far, then disappears, in a sea of evil.
You will not find your place in it all.
Your family may be in one of the documents
my son has unearthed in his searching.
There is no way of knowing.
Lavenia, negro woman
Archy, negro man
Alley, negro girl
Luke, negro man
Peggy, negro woman
Cesar, negro boy
Bought from Joshua Bland, April 22, 1774, for $364
Sold to William Norris, December 1, 1818, for $147
Bought from Frances Posey, February 2, 1834, for $580
Year after year, sales and purchases,
in column after column,
in carefully inked ledgers.
Such beautiful penmanship.
Such meticulous record-keeping.
Boys fetch high prices, as much as $791—
such investments yield high returns
in decades of crops planted, harvested, taken to market,
in houses built, roads cleared, new properties sired.
The names of the people bought and sold change,
pages of people, “Christian” names only.
To their buyers and sellers, “nigras” didn’t have families.
But the family names of those “Christian” men are there.
Again and again—my family name.
.
What is there to do, now?
My Carolina father was a linthead,
the bottom of the white pecking order in that harsh south,
into the mills at 13, a runaway to sea at 16.
There’s nothing to deed over, no blood-money to transfer.
Generations of buying and selling human beings
came down to one scared white boy running for his life,
away from bosses who saw him as trash,
away from a life of outhouses, and a death of white lung,
away from a lesser, minor servitude to a boss’s demand
for a return on the investment made in his meagre wages.
And now it’s down to me
staring at that ledger and wondering
how the books can ever be balanced.
There’s respect,
for all whose humanity was denied,
all who survived,
all who were denied families, denied family names,
all who died without their families around them.
There’s attention,
to the value and the needs of the living,
with a voice,
with a vote,
with my own writing,
with raising anti-racist sons,
with welcoming a new, wider centering of power,
with amplifying the voices of the long silenced,
with years of putting their work before my own.
It isn’t enough.
I know.
There is no enough.