The Epiphany by Melodie Jackson

For more articles like this, please visit the Fall 2018 Issue.
It was around midday. 12:30 to be exact. You can have some hallucinatory experiences around that time. Especially when you haven’t eaten and the kid in your last class just told his hell story of driving through “the ghetto” with a bat in his hand in case someone mistook his nonblack skin and blushed, red cheeks for a baseball. I checked my twitter because TVs were now digital and gave me more in 140 characters for less. Flooding my timeline, like Katrina drowning black bodies, was #SayHerName #NiaWilson #JusticeforNiaWilson. Now, I believe names to be sacred, but when attached to a hashtag, I retreat and flinch because all of X’s and O’s leave no room for breathing. #SayHerName I read once more. Before I could search for her existence in an all-consuming internet bar, my sister called.
“Did you see what happened to Nia? They killed that poor girl. In public.” Breathless from the hashtags and my sister’s news that found before I could seek, I spat out, “What. Happened?” She told me. Emphasizing the “in public” part again. As if our death were ever a private matter. As if anything on body belongs to us. Maybe her saying that was a way to tell grief to respect her privacy.
I sat there and thought about Nia. About Me. About Names. I’d come to class day after day and evoked names that put breath into my lungs. Ida. Harriet. Coretta. Betty. Diane. And I sat thinking about Nia. How your body could be taken away from you any minute. And I discovered that Justice had to become real to me, and I had to know Truth for myself.
And I kneeled down over the ground of my roots and prayed. Legs can only bear weight for so long. I must never forget it. I spoke to heaven, and I cried out loud to whoever would hear. I said, “God, Nia was around my age. I’m discouraged. I’m scared. I think our lives matter. I think our bodies are sacred. I think that we are right. How do we power on with so little power? And Lord, my nieces and nephews can’t see my heart broken because they are the healers of tomorrow. They cannot lose faith in their medicine.”
Buried deep beneath the black male bodies of Black Lives Matter and the black male leaders of the million man marches, the gardener of young, black souls, “more than Martin’s widow,” Coretta came to me later. And because our pain is never private, I could hear her say to me, as though through microphone:
“Beloved, Your generation must speak out with righteous indignation against the forces which are seeking to destroy us … The world is in dire need of a spiritual awakening which will make those eternal values of love, justice, mercy, and peace meaningful in our times. [Stand up for] the prophetic essence in the demands [you are] voicing. You must be the prodding conscience to those in power and those aspiring to it. We may yet not only survive-we may triumph. And lo, I am with you even until the end of salvation.”
I heard Coretta say to power on. To keep on. To say Nia along with Ida. Harriet. Coretta. To remember. The legacy from which I come. Where black women took the ribs from husbands, building their own fire, and sustained entire generations. Where they were whole bodies and not just limbs. Where books and whiteboards replaced chains and cotton seeds. Where Birmingham streets and water hoses propelled children from classrooms to Oval Offices. Where to be student was to be Politian. To be Public. To be encouraged. To be Healer.
And so I listened. I continue. We must continue. Calling forth black women out of shadows. Black girls into public before death. From behind hashtags—where there is room to breathe. The student must be woman and the woman must be student. No longer powerless and invisible. We will lead the movement. Beyond sanitized histories and false memories. Beyond “intense prayer [that] will not ease the violence in our lives.” Where our work will not hide beyond great institutions and bronze statues. Where more than our grief and death will be public. Where our spiritual awakening and prophetic essence will disrupt all comfortable privacy. Where we cry to heaven, and like a voice from the dust, Mrs. Coretta, one of the greatest organizers and leaders of the movement, will take Martin Luther King days and march us into Truth. Into Mercy. Into Justice. Into Love. Into Peace.”
She promised to never leave us alone.