So We Can Know by Aracelis Girmay

Author:Aracelis Girmay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

1.Readers are invited to enrich their reading of this text by reviewing the endnotes.

The Beginning and End of It

Patricia Smith

The first time the it kicked, and every time after, you were nauseated at the sight of its rhythmically pummeling foot/fist idly hunting for a way out of its sloshing shelter, its dark soup. If not for those ill-timed little rhumbas—which always seemed to happen when you were stupefied and bare-bellied in a mirror or stumbling into cavernous clothing while your mother screeched weep—you could almost forget it was there.

Well no, you couldn’t forget, because your scrawny little self had swallowed a moon and then another moon, because you were always starving, because you ritually crammed peppermint sticks down the center of sour pickles and crunched the cool hurt, because more than a few times you found yourself sprawled on the kitchen floor in front of a gaping Frigidaire, scooping vinegary pigs’ feet out of their cloudy liquid straight from the jar, slurping the skin and scraping the hock with your teeth until the bone shone white in the icy-blue light. Black folks insisted on their January 1 pigs’ feet because, they said, pigs’ feet were always rooted in the ground and pushing forward, which is the same direction you should want to go every year. But you and the it couldn’t wait for a holiday. Not enough forward left for the two of you.

Come to think of it, folks who came up to Chicago from Alabama or Mississippi had a story for everything a pig had to offer, for every vile plop of innard, for every weary foot and unplucked snout. You actually even looked forward to your mother’s Saturday morning chitlin’ assembly line—the vinegar, the scrubbing, the vinegar, the scrubbing, the rinsing, the scrubbing, the rinsing, the three endless cycles of hot water. You saw no real reason for the sanitary ritual. You were convinced that the it would probably fancy a little dirt.

Your stomach lurched at the vampish stench while the church sisters hissed and sniffed at your dainty retching and babbled about the Lord Jesus and His reasons for things. Eventually they’d come to the conclusion that there was even a reason for you, sneaky gal, definitely up to sumthin’, up from college for no reason, hiding evidence of the it under a series of beflowered shifts, your sadiddy mother skittish and sweaty with deception. Because it would never do for the child she’d bragged and bragged about to be—Jesus Christ, Lawd no—with burden, like those nasty gals in the projects, the ones who asked for it with their practiced swivels and the whole of their mouths.

As long as the it was merely suspected but never verified or outright asked about, your mother could keep her standing in the flimsy hierarchy of the reverent and bountifully blessed. She could slouch saintly in the front pew of Pilgrims Rest Missionary Baptist Church every Sunday, drowning in her choir robe, then rise to lend her creaking alto to the

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