BELINDA EDWARDS
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GRIEF BUNDLE
i. My body is a glazed black pot. Inside it is damp, dark, mysterious, with blue veins crisscrossing like rivers. It is shaped by the hands of an old lady, her fingers digging in the damp clay, squeezing wet earth through old fingers, pinching and shaping with flat thumbs. She beats clay into shape, working day and night creating; touching dewy, sticky places; kneading broken, unmended shadow. Before I was born, hyenas howled at my door, threating to pull me into the underworld. A brown baby girl born in the “colored” ward, pulled from the womb by white hands. Slapped. I sound the alarm in this black and white world. At one year old, the only child of Eara and LeRoy Frances, I stand on a pedestal, in a flowered Easter dress, holding my stuffed bunny as the photographer takes my picture. This image echoes the black and white picture of my mother taken when she was five years old in 1932, standing in a torn flowered dress next to her father, Monroe O’Conner, and another picture taken of my granddaughter in 1993 when she was one year old, sitting on a pedestal in a flowered dress with a hat on. Three generations stare into the camera, watching. Until September 13th, I am an only child, with all eyes focused on me. Disruption, chaos: a boy is born. I never forgive him. I am five. A man with a sandy complexion walks into a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. He places a Nehi orange soda and a pack of cookies on the counter and watches the shadows of Carolyn Bryant’s white hand move on the counter as she places his items in a paper bag. ln the city, he dances with white girls like her, holding them close, smelling their hair, allowing his hands to run up and down their back as he presses his thighs into their bodies. Here in Money, a wink calls the hyenas, who, during the dark moon, with lit touches and white hoods, drag him screaming from his great-uncle’s house. Did he call out for his mother, for mercy? Beaten, mutilated, and
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Volume 16 • 2021
