There is no balm in Gilead.

Today, the faces staring back at me through time, black and white photographs, eyes wide, curious, wondering what we’ll do next.

They were babies. Bible study in the church basement. At home tucked in their beds. In the schoolhouse learning to read. Sitting on the porch next to mama and brother and sister, waiting for pop to come home. Grandma to come home. He never did. She never did. They never did.

Because of this apparent infraction or perception of a wrongdoing, or, plainly, truthfully, now anyone can see, a lie. He crossed the street at an “odd” time. She lingered by the door “too long.” He sued a man who murdered his cow. She tried to register to vote.

All in the name of maintaining power, a social order, a racial hierarchy, a state of fear so strong it caused the great migration northward. One of the largest migrations of people. People who had already been kidnapped. Keep moving to outrun and to outlive.

When slavery was declared dead it had to go underground, under the skin, under a new name, under the boot of a policeman’s foot, under the shovel of the chain gang, under the narrative of a super predator, under the war on drugs, under the extra detentions, under the beliefs and cultures and mores of a society based on stolen lands and stolen bodies.

We can trace the lynching of men, women, and children through this campaign of terror that still haunts this country.

A ghost

It doesn’t haunt as much as it remains.

It still is.

A thin veil.

A pallor.

A mist, hovering across the Alabama landscape in the early morning, blanketing as far as the eye can see and the mind can dream.

Of the past.

Feel the dirt, the sand, the clay in the present. So many colors of the earth. All collected from the hundreds of lynching sites around this god-forsaken country.

Those men, women and children now returned to the earth.

The future yet unwritten.

Written after a visit to both The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.