Woe Is Me!
First I can’t Gogh and then I have to Gaugin!
I’m sorry, I just had to ‘go’ there. It is true. I am under compulsion to express myself creatively. It’s 5am again, sleep fled from me ten years ago (at least!), and I am drawing sheep instead of counting them. In my other journal I describe my physical pain-it is at a new level of cruelty. I lie on my bed and moan, no amount of useless meds suffice to touch this beast.
Is that why the faces all show this somehow tense+sad expression? Wistful longing for that elusive loosening of the bonds? Perhaps. I try to draw them less like who I see in the mirror, more like I imagine my ancestors to be. Those “other” Keel’s, in the ‘colored’ graveyard. The ones listed before 1865 as slaves who seem to disappear into thin air on the ‘new and improved’ census after the war. Mysteriously reappearing as ‘household servants’-female, age 10 years. Female, age 17…
I thought it was a lark, looking up ‘my people’…amazed that my dirt poor, shoeless, hog farming grandpas had come from England a few generations prior, settling in “The Colony” , with names prefixed with titles like Lord and Sir.
Such noble men and women whose blue blood runs thru my veins. How naive I was, never considered the blood on their hands. Native peoples whose entire lines and tribes now blotted out of existence, as their lands got hacked and sawed and planted with Tobacco, and cotton.
I always thought how beautiful brown skin is, and wished I were a black or brown skinned girl. Now I cry because I may actually be here because a child was hurt, a young woman stolen from every semblance of loving kindnes… Ah well…
I color an imaginary scenario with so much room for uncertainty… I will just let it be for now.
n
SUSAN TODD MARTIN 