Wow, Ezinne. You have done it, again: moved me to my own remembering, my own accounting and the past that weighs on us all, collectively and individually.

My 1st memory of the torture of Black men came early. I was at least 3 and not quite 5. I recently had to ask my mom if I had dreamed it. It seemed unreal but I have always remembered it. She remembered and said she was glad I hadn’t brought it up until after my father had died because he always worried that remembering, seeing what I saw, would hurt me too deeply to heal.

It did.

And I shouldn’t and won’t heal until such torture, hate and hurt ceases. Or maybe at least until it becomes non-systematic. She helped me narrow my age. My middle sister was born. We hadn’t yet moved back to Houston. We can only guess a range.

We were going to visit my paternal grandparents in Louisiana. It was dark and probably quite late, close to midnight. One cannot get to that tiny town even today without taking a back road off the interstate, a road without light.

I do not remember anything before it or after. It happened between 1957 and 1959. I looked up to see 3 White men with fear in their eyes running, scattering like roaches in light. A gun fired. Twice. The headlights of the car shown on a giant, spreading Live Oak with branches low to the ground. Hanging from those branches was moss, old lady looking hair, long, grey and tangled. Hanging from one branch was a rope. And the glistening body of a Black young man. I see him as a young man. My mom can’t help me with that. She became too scared and tried to see if her older child was looking because my father asked her to be sure I wasn’t. He was telling and pulling over. My mother was screaming for him not to stop. Did he want us all killed?

And I just kept looking. To this day I swear I saw him, the real him: his essence, rising like mist on a swamp. But we weren’t near any swamp, bayou or body of water. I and my mom remember that I began talking to him. My talking startled my parents into quieting. She doesn’t remember what I said. She says that my dad said he heard me laugh, say something about “not hurting anymore?” as a question and then I burst into tears.

I cried because he filled me with his story. The way you feel me with your stories. The way we all should be filled with each other’s stories so we feel empathy rather than defensive. So we open rather than close.

It is his story I carry now and forever. I remember every word he said, the freedom he felt, the kindness he brought and what he whispered. He swore me to secrecy.

It took me a few more years, some maturity and life, to understand that what happened that night was systematic, that the torture of Black men in the United States of America is systemic.

It wasn’t just seeing a daddy dead in his carport, Medgar Evers, or seeing the drooling dogs and contorted angry White faces spraying fire hoses at people and beating people who were doing nothing wrong and offered no resistance, or seeing, although on the news and in newspapers, more hanging Black bodies, or even seeing that girls, just a bit older than I was, were killed in a Baptist Church Sunday School where I sat every Sunday: it was all of it and more. But I understood by the time I was 8.

My maternal grandfather had a cross burned at his business and in his front yard for hiring Black men and paying them the same wages as he paid White men. In 1960’s East Texas. He made a Black man the manager because he earned the job. Louie Gohmert represents his district now. Enough said.

My paternal grandfather took us to the feed store with him in that tiny town in Louisiana. It was thrilling to this city girl to climb atop what then seemed a mountain high stack of giant bags and then slide off of them. We’d walk with him, my sister, my cousins and I, down the main street to the pool hall. I remember when a Black man approached him and made himself small and averted his eyes and my grandfather called him a word I had never heard. The “n” word. I remember feeling ashamed and not knowing why. I remember my gentle dad pulling the car over on our way back to Houston and raising his hand in anger to me for the first and last time when I asked what that word meant. He didn’t strike me but he came very close. He started to ask me where I had heard such a word but muttered, “Nevermind, I know…” and explained that it was akin to using any “bad” word that adults used but kids couldn’t. except this word was the worst word of all. Even adults were forbidden from using that word. “Even your grandfather who will not use it again in your presence.” Being an 8 year old every Sunday and Wednesday night Baptist, I worried fir years that my grandfather was going to hell for using that word. Just wait.

My grandfather never said that word in my presence, again. He even stopped his old men friends who started to say it. “Nuf! This is Ken’s.”

The day we buried my grandfather I found out he was a member of the KKK. My dad never knew. At least, that’s what everyone thought. I can’t imagine he didn’t. I and a cousin are taking the risk of researching Klan activity in his Parish during his life. He is our grandfather, an admittedly gruff, sometimes angry man. But we loved him. He saved my cousin from abuse. We are all a mix of light and shadow. Facing our shadow, incorporating it, brings us closer to wholeness.

I appreciate what Ryan Luikens responded to your story, “In external culture and internal psyche, past traumas live on in descendants.” I believe it. I am guided by Jung. The past traumas my family brought live in me.

As I have written on Medium before, a 4th great grandfather of mine mastered slave ships out of Liverpool. He kidnapped living human beings and took them from their homeland, their families and culture. He delivered them to Jamaica for sale. I know because the records of each ship he mastered, the route each took, the number of people who boarded, the number who disembarked (never the same) are available online through a museum. He made enough money to begin buying the ships. I am still researching to get their names and records.

His son, a 3rd great, was the 1st American in that family. He raped his slave at least 4 times because DNA and his diaries prove it. She, and I shall name her as she deserves, Felonise, had her 1st son at the age of 15. Was my great a pedophile and a rapist? All my 4th great grandfathers in that strip of Louisiana have gifted me with Black half-cousins. I love the ones I’ve met online but I hate that Felonise was raped. I always apologize when I email them to introduce myself. They say it isn’t my fault.

My mom’s father, the one who had the crosses burned on his properties, comes from a family that was among America’s 1st. My 12th great grandfather bought stock in the 3rd Charter of the Virginia Company of London at the requed. America wasn’t founded by people looking for religious freedom. America was founded on and by corporate interests.

My 11th great helped legislate White Privilege as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. Before that, tobacco growers were importing children and others, Black and White, from mostly England as Indentured Servants. Living together, as human beings will, many feel in love and began families. They began to get restless and talk of uprising because of the conditions under which they lived and because the holders of their indentures kept extending the time of servitude. No matter the color of their skin, most of these servants couldn’t read it write. You can bet none had recourse to any lawyer. The House of Burgesses took care of that: they gave White Male Indentureds, at the end of their contract, 50 acres of land, a mule or horse and the vote. Oh, and they also, later, decided that one’s “color” came from one’s mother. And no one with one drop of Black blood could own land. They took away any incentive for White males to free their friends and families. And between those 2 legislations, came slaves. Non-Indentureds who could ever be free and peskily make moral demands. Slaves. Owned forever.

Human beings cannot be owned.

Your work always moves me. I have never taken anything you wrote as if you hated me. However, I wouldn’t blame you if you did.

Thank you for showing empathy at a time I fear it is dying. It is the only thing that can heal us, save us.

I have friends who tell me I shouldn’t carry guilt for something my family did before I was born. I feel how I feel. I carry what I carry.

I feel profoundly awful and a profound sense of responsibility to do all I can to create all they destroyed, to return what they took.

I am sorry.

I have a profound sense of responsibility to do what that misty rising, that spirit of that young Black man who had just been murdered by 3 fearful, angry White cowards whispered to me. I cannot tell a secret that isn’t mine to tell but I can live it. I understood and understand my Rising friend. And he is my friend. probably my cousin. I am imbued with his spirit as well as my own simmering anger and guilt to make a difference for Black Lives, even as I understand it won’t be enough.

Thank you for writing. Thank you for your advocacy. Thank you for not hating people like me who are White. Given the same circumstances, I hope I could be as magnanimous and forgiving it at least understanding.

You are a jewel and a gentlewoman.