Category : Stories

Sub Category : Historical Fiction

In a dream, my ancestors surrounded me in field full of unmarked graves only made with pieces of wood nailed together as a cross; shackled wrists and ankles, wearing the hatred around their necks and blood pouring out of their wounds. One walked up to face me, the new generation, and spoke:

"My beautiful black daughters and my handsome black sons, hear my words. I, the old generation, ran to escape these," he lifted his hands to show me his bloodstained chains and thick cuffs of metal, "and you, my children, have chosen to get back into them. Wasn't my pain enough for you with the knowledge you have in school today, something we could not have as slaves? Something you take for granted? You just had to feel it for yourself, huh?

 The feel of the cold, heavy chains around your wrists. The sound of those cage doors slam shut and lock and the sight of it as the bars shook but remain in tact for the security of stay. The small of a small and dirty call and the overwhelming stench of rust on the bars. However, that is a very small TASTE of what WE: the people who worked, the people who sang and ran for freedom, the people who learned so they could educate our people, the people who made made meals and cleaned everyday so you could have a hot meal and warm bed to sleep in, the people who spoke out in speeches about freedom, who sang and marched for our freedom, who fought for freedom, who risked EVERYTHING and EVERYONE they had for our freedom, who died and made it through it all to be able to give you freedom and to make sure you never had to suffer the way we did. For you to show us, the very people who won an on going war for you, that our work was for nothing and that we all died in vain. 

I know white is all color, making all shades of beauty, while black is the absence of color so it is not consider one but holds its own unique beauty. I know white people rule over all beautiful shades of people while black either hides away or dies, making them absent from the fight for all. Just because the color black is the absence of all colors does NOT mean that it is in the absence of all existing!

We died trying to make sure that black hands soaked in red did not grasp at jail bars but alongside white hands cloaked in blue grasping at the stars. Now you, my children, have shackled wrists and ankles, wearing the hatred on your bodies in the colors of orange and red and your open wounds pouring. My broken black women and my hungry black men, you have become the history that lies in your shadows in the fields behind you and you have tarnished the future we so desperately tried to build in front of you. You have the men and women with the hereditary whip to beat us all once again and you have disappointed us."

With that they walked back further into the field and disappeared within their graves. I woke up to the sound of banging metal; locked away and dressed in orange, caged like an animal.

How history repeats itself....

©Marie McNeill