Poem: Vessel

Elegy #4 of 30 Elegies for Black Women Educators

a home girl asks

“i wonder what their wives did.”

today,

i’m given the task of editing

an educator’s legacy

he’s written about

his daddy

his granddaddy,

and his great-granddaddy

says teaching is in his blood

i seek census records

biographies

an inquiry spread

across a broken archive link

i must

continuously

refresh

i find grandma

and great grandma

sitting on a line

of a crossed out census record

like a lone porch

in the south

waiting for someone to find them

first one is nothing

then, domestic

ten years later a teacher

he knows this

he wrote the blood

and left out the vessel

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Go find one census record or lineage record for a woman in your family. Just one. Come back and tell me what it says, but as a poem.

Tag it #AndManyMoreICouldSummon so we can witness each other.