Thrust: A Novel

I worked hard for Jessie. I proofread and typed up notes and just swam inside the ocean of her creative and editorial waters. As she started writing for The Brownies’ Book, the children’s magazine, I worked with her on that too. Nothing is more important than giving children stories they can grab on to and live by. Stories about gender, race, class, pride; stories that inspire children, that show them where they came from. For years, Jessie created the large majority of the content in The Brownies’ Book. Its pages were filled with African folktales. Before I had that job, most of the stories I read about Black girls were about slavery, or rape, or violence against Black women and girls. But even the advertising in The Brownies’ Book was devoted to education, schools, training classes, colleges, and universities.

Sometimes it seemed to me that Jessie did the work underneath everything that was gleaming on the surface of our lives. You know, like how mothers do. Like she was a creativity mother, but she was also an intellect — an intellectual mother. Sometimes, when I think about what work is, I think of that — how there is no place that recognizes “mother” as a form of employment, recognizes how many women mother us back to life.

Epistle

Cruces 6

Sometimes photographers came to document our labor, to capture our motion in a stilled image.

At first, we might have felt seen. Once, when her hand was still plaster but not yet covered with copper skin, we gathered around it, posing like children. We looked so small there, next to her enormous hand, but without our labor, she would never have been born, so standing together there made us become, in that moment, a single body. The photos were made into postcards, which were sold — another means of financing the project. Our names were not attached to our bodies, but when we looked at the postcards, we could see how tall we were standing next to our work. The organism of us. My name — Kem — never appeared in any story. Nor did the names Endora or David or John Joseph.

But the photographs were not about who we really were, or our labor, or our lives; they were about the story she was becoming, the spectacle. Sometimes newspaper stories would make their way to us. We read and heard many insults against her, even as we were still building her. One in particular stood out to me, from the Cleveland Gazette: “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and his family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed.”

None of us said anything out loud when the insults and challenges came, but those words went into our bodies alongside our labor, and we ground them into us, maybe the way the bodies of the people who built the pyramids were ground up into the stone and grain and blood of the structures.

I told Endora and John Joseph and David about the Cleveland Gazette story one day, after it lodged itself in my dreams. I started to have nightmares about Black bodies in boats. I didn’t want the images to take over my life. My father and his father and his father had moved through slavery stories, had carried them forward like the bodies of sons.

I thought about the revolution in my country that no one here ever told stories about. How self-liberated Haitians had fought successfully to overturn French colonial rule. I thought about John Joseph and his stories of genocide perpetrated under the brutal cover story of discovery. How his ancestors’ stories got buried like bones. I thought about Endora being haunted by a dead infant buried in the ground next to her church in Ireland — how many babies were likely buried in that ground, how at night the wind and dark were their only solace. I thought about the scars on David’s back, how I wished I could tongue them away.

Could we ever become part of the story of this place? Or was something always slipping away?

I thought about the girl who had come from the water, and the woman we were building between the water and god. Then it occurred to me that I had never met grace in any god like the grace in David, Endora, and John Joseph. God was just a story.