Un-American by Hafizah Augustus Geter

Author:Hafizah Augustus Geter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

TESTIMONY

FOR SANDRA BLAND, 1987–2015

After the miscarriage, she moved to Waller County

wearing the ghost of motherhood

and wanting to make old wounds foreign.

In my bedroom, I read aloud the list

of her contusions, watched an officer

drag her from her car over and over again.

As if the humiliations would never be done,

there were typos in her autopsy report.

The words: no signs of struggle.

I thought: her body is my body, is a church

set fire, is the toil that makes the land,

a jail cell, light as a paper bag,

the sound my father makes

when, after so many years, he says my mother’s name.

Twenty-eight,

they split her open where slaves grew

cotton at the banks of the Brazos and students

at Prairie View A&M can barely vote

and laid her bare—a coroner’s wishbone

carved in her chest.

In Waller County, they still segregate

their cemeteries, name

some murders suicide.

They fire their police chief,

vote him Sheriff.

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