Little Africa on Fire

This is how the story begins: a touch, a bump, a hot mouth,

jostled skin in an elevator, escalation, tension, even just the illusion

of trespass. It always seems the smallest contact triggers the fire,

the tip of a match struck along the lips of containment.

For a while, my sister and I thought the world had no color

until the 1960s, convinced that old movies and photos were true

representations of history, whole stories; that color came

between cartoons and Civil Rights and long before then the world

was two-toned, light and dark, sometimes with flecks or aberrations

in the corners. Upon seeing pictures of our parents both black-

and-white and in color, we asked: What changed? Upon seeing pictures

of Greenwood, both beautiful and burned, I ask: What stories

have I been taught to trust?

There are three parts to a ghost story:

The Specter—planes in the sky,

dynamite dropped on a Black crowd,

a white mob, a machine gun expelling

bullets, American flag high behind it,

fire and smoke in its wake, a long march

past husks of burned-out churches,

eight days of interment of Blacks

by the thousands, loops of litigation

spraining the language of massacre into

"riot," insurance claims lost in the litter

of legal destruction.

The Apparition—a flat view of Earth

has always made Africa look little,

smaller than Greenland; a flat view

of Earth is what schools only had

for us to see ourselves; a flat view

of us pinned back prosecution and

punishment for the mapmakers,

cartographing themselves out

of the haunted history lying

flat beneath the earth.

The Murmur—we know a lie when it unfurls

in our hands, how consequences char

irregularity into myth; we know our hauntings

because a family keeps its ghosts close; we know

pain, we know plunder, we know echoes.

This is how to listen to a ghost story:

Remember that there are no better angels

above or beneath our skies, above or beneath

charred churches and trees. These angels,

their halos falling augustly, deciduously.

stories strapped to a branch lost against the forest.

Heaven is a Black place, a smoky silhouette

the tintype tattles on. Heaven is full of anomalies.

How do I explain my homesickness for this?

I can't stop dreaming about flames

in my mouth, in my palms and eyes at all times.

I can't stop crying for Tulsa and a hundred years

spent dirt-deep and silent beneath our feet.

This is how to cross-examine a ghost: Rouse it with radar

and listen to the echoes of old fire. Sometimes it takes a mouth

to pronounce what the earth has been whispering for generations.

sometimes flecks in the corners of photos are more

than aberrations, the black and white of it lying in plain sight.

This is how to give a ghost a home: Touch the dirt

outside your house and ask how different it might feel

in Greenwood, ask if the sunken anomalies push

against the surface around town, if those anomalies

still burn down deep, if the anomalies are still hot

in their mouths, their tongues boxes of un-struck matches.

It's the silence of fire that remains spectral, substituted

for memory—but no more. Little Africa pounds

heart-first against the dirt and emerges tongue, tooth,

and throat in bonfire, heritage unmortgaged,

a ghost-girl beating back the map of her unmaking.

Source: Murmur (Autumn House Press, 2024)