Free White and Twenty One

During slavery, the children with white mothers and black fathers were often killed. The children with white fathers and black mothers were often raised in the house if they appeared pale enough to pass for nothing, subtle ghosts of confederate lust. A constant reminder of his failure to please his wife or distract his daughter enough to deliver her from the temptation to mate with a black man and enjoy it, such a blow to the ego and the power structure on plantations was dangerous, and what if the child was beautiful too, and smart in new ways. How much blasphemy was safe in an atmosphere where rebellion was always a notion away. But dressed in a white man’s name and DNA, a child born of either elicit desire or casual rape, as long it was the white man’s choice, was safe, spared, helped remind everyone of his terror and terrible lure. Under that disastrous social contract, I might have been some kind of animal sacrifice. Centuries later when my grandparents who had sent my mother to catholic school her whole life and are strict catholics themselves for the most part, decided sin could make an exception and suggested my mother have an abortion when she was pregnant with me, a white woman pregnant with a black man’s child, nothing had really moved in the collective consciousness but the rule of law.  To condemn a parent’s rebellion on one level and cherish it on another is the sacred hypocrisy of genetics, we grow out of it, become whole. So when account for my mother as satire I also count her as accidental saint, fellow runner. There are so many ways to run away from home and in saying no to that abortion my mother, free, white, and twenty one in Iowa, became an underexamined form of fugitive, a fugitive’s understudy, a white woman trafficking blackness, and I got to live. God Bless America.