The first time she showed me the scar, she traced its path with her finger along the soft underside of her knee, like a small winding creek on a map. She was around five or six years old when it happened. Her life back then consisted of farming on the mountains of Luzon with her family and peddling vegetables door to door. One day, a large tuber she lugged on her head slipped and shot down like a cannonball to the back of her leg, splitting open skin on impact. That is how she remembers it.
Watching him roll his own cigarettes with the pungent tobacco he kept in a shoebox is one of my favorite childhood memories. How he would sprinkle the dried weed into the coarse, yellowed paper, roll it between his fingers, and then with one fluid motion swipe the tip of his tongue along the glued edge.
I’m going to go backwards through this particular part of my story because I hate to end on a sad note. So that would place my friend John and me in 2005 in a small churchyard on Route 30 in Barbour County, Alabama somewhere between Clayton and Eufaula, from where we had just come. Mid-July and we’re standing in a patch of shade at the back of the church, the only relief available, it being three o’clock p.m. in the sunny damn hot south.
While the tamales cooked in that giant olla, my mom, Grandma, and our Tia Fela from Texas told stories about picking cotton, infidelity, and death. My favorite were the stories about the unstable family members from Texas: the one that had OCD about sweeping his dirt floor, the one that had conversations with his urine, and the one they forced to wear mittens so he wouldn't pick and scratch at his face. Grandma and Tia Fela disagreed about the details because Grandma remembered the day she was born so, of course, she remembered the color of the knitted yarn and the shape of scratches on primos face. But Tia was more of a memoirist and told only the emotional truth. She pointed to her temple and said "el estava malito.".
Kweli is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization supported by readers like you and by grants from organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, Amazon Literary Partnership and the Whiting Foundation.
