by Heidi Rhodes
I excavate the epigenetic residue, strata of history and its traumas. The hue of my Uncle’s arms wrapped around me, tracing my fingers around the cigarette and clove follicles embedded in his darkness, epidermal storying speaks quiet declarations, of the Black Atlantic and severed gods, ruptured prayer, jungle ghosts, genealogies left behind in the struggle to survive in a land where white was beauty, and power, and all that was solid, enough in the eye’s eye.
My grandfather is the lightest of his siblings his white papery skin translucent in the Paisa sun, no match for the deep-laden shield of his brothers’ and sisters’ cinnamon umber. He regales me with tales of his youth, love, always love, and the beauty of my grandmother, reminding me how she was forbidden by her parents to see him, because he liked to drink his aguardiente a little too much: that is the story he tells.
My grandmother, however much she flung her obedience into the mountainside to hold his hand through a cracked window till the violet hours of dusk, insisted that the disfavor lay in skin-time, the coarse wire of his hair, the Black of Black, the Brown of Brown, staining him and his family- and he- either denies this, or does not remember.
He does not remember how he refused to eat the sancocho if it was made by Black hands, as though the very cells of his own kin rebelled his memory against himself, forgetting the manos negras of his grandmothers, the warmth of their breasts, the songs they wrapped him in, their medicine of eucalyptus leaves and chickens’ feet, the history of histories that held the nest for life itself stored in their gums, maps of escape routes from the era of slavery woven into their braids, the wounds of mourning and ever the fight.
He remembers that white was the cream of his love’s cheek. Published in the imaginary of his deliverance, white was the reach to providence and provision; it was the solidity of stucco walls keeping out the wind; the color virtue, Jesus hanging from the cross. White was access and accomplishment; escape from the dust and sweat of farming and illiteracy. It was honor and chivalry; sex; the robust muscle of industry in the castle-cloud of the metropolis.
He heaves the lacuna, dragging it through the city, kissing it into the ears of his children, and somewhere, beneath the shade of orange bricks and Devil’s Breath, it is lost: the archive and chronicling, of sound and sense, skin and song, a generation’s becoming in the aria of seizure, rent from the root, born in the rot and tumble of conquest’s inheritance, the multitude of death and exhalations, the rationing of extance-
sometimes all that is left of memory
is the skin.
*2014 Colorism Poetry Contest Division 3 Honorable Mention
About the Poet: Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a mixed-race Colombian, second-generation immigrant born and raised in the United States. She is a writer, scholar, artist, and political activist. Her performance, creative writing, and photography have been seen or are forthcoming in places such as San Francisco’s SomArts, Galería de la Raza, Wilde, Brown and Proud Press, The Progressive, Mobius: A Journal for Social Change, Yellow Medicine Review, Descant, From the Ground Up, and others. She currently lives in Brooklyn.