I don’t know what she wanted to do with them, Mrs. Johnson said.
She talked and talked, picking her way from memory to memory, crossing a wide ocean on stepping-stones. Remember this, Marie’s mother said, again and again. Hold on to it. As if memory were a bead that might spring from her fingers, clatter to the floor, roll into a crack and disappear. Which it was. At night, swaddled in her bedroll in the Johnsons’ living room, Margaret jotted down what Marie’s mother had said, each word echoing like a chime. But while Mrs. Johnson talked, Margaret simply listened and listened and listened.
The second night, Marie’s father stepped in from the hallway. He looked at his wife, sitting on their daughter’s flowery bed; at Margaret, cross-legged on the floor.
You know the last thing I said to her, he said.
No greeting, no introduction. As if he’d been waiting a long time to say just this.
She told me, on the phone. How there was this protest planned, protesting PACT, how she planned to go and hold up a sign. I said, Marie, that ain’t about you. You think those PAOs would stick their necks out for you? You think any of them care when we get followed in stores, or shot in traffic stops? Just let it be.
He paused.
She’d been doing research, he went on. Trying to trace our family tree. In high school, she got curious. She was at the library all the time, looking at databases and census records, trying to find her roots. Our roots. What she found was a big blank spot. No records, before Emancipation—except for one. A bill of sale, for my maybe-ancestor. Age eleven. To a Mr. Johnson in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Another pause. He looked down at Margaret, and she looked up at him. Listening.
I didn’t want her to go. But she was set on it. She just said: It’s wrong to take children from their families, Daddy. You know that. And she didn’t want to argue so we just hung up and the next day she went to that march.
He stood there, framed by the doorway, a strong man made fragile by grief. Margaret’s mother had crossed the street when she saw men like him approaching. Out of disdain? Out of fear? She didn’t know and wasn’t sure it mattered. At the factory where her father worked, there were only a handful of Black men, and her father hadn’t socialized with any of them. Not my kind of people, he’d said, and she hadn’t bothered to ask what he meant.
You weren’t wrong, Margaret said at last. You weren’t wrong. But neither was Marie.
A small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.
Mr. Johnson settled himself down on the bed next to his wife, who put her arm around him and turned her face to his shoulder, and they sat there quietly, the three of them, in Marie’s room, Margaret a witness to what they’d lost.
After a long, long while, he said: You know what keeps coming back to me? This one night, I came home from work.
The memory seeping out of him, like water filtered through stone.
I don’t even remember how old she was. She might’ve been five, she might’ve been fifteen.
Margaret did not question; she understood this, how slippery and elastic time was in the fact of your child, how it seemed to move not in a line but in endless loops, circling back again and again, overwriting itself.
She was laughing, Marie’s father said. Laughing and laughing and laughing. Laughing so hard she couldn’t stand up. Laughing so hard tears were running down her face. I came in and I saw her there, rolling on the carpet. Just laughing. Marie, I said, what’s so funny? She just kept on laughing. Until I started laughing, too. I couldn’t help it.
He was half laughing again, as the memory of it swirled around him, pulling him back into the past.
Finally she calmed down and she just lay there. Catching her breath, looking at the ceiling, big smile still on her face. Marie, I said again, what’s so funny? She let out a big sigh. She looked so happy. Everything, she said. Everything.
* * *
? ? ?
She left Marie’s family with a request, and a name.
Put her in a poem, Mr. Johnson said, she’d like that. You put her in a poem, okay? Make other people remember her.
I’ll try, Margaret said, though she knew, already, that no poem could encapsulate Marie, just as no poem could encapsulate Bird. There would always be too much left unsaid.
Mrs. Johnson said nothing, just hugged Margaret, even tighter than Margaret hugged her. They would never speak again, but they were linked now, as those who’ve been through something terrible together are forever fused, in ways they don’t always understand.
The name was the librarian’s, though the Johnsons only knew her last: Mrs. Adelman this, Mrs. Adelman that, that’s all that came out of Marie’s mouth all of high school, her mother said, she spent all her free time over there. Across town; catch the bus on the corner. Margaret walked instead, following the trail of bus stop signs, the bus itself lumbering past her at encouraging intervals, reassuring her she was still on the path. By the time she reached the library, six buses had passed her, and perhaps it was because of this that she had the feeling, ascending the steps of the library, that she had been here before, that some previous version or versions of herself had already arrived, were already within, had already discovered what she herself was only now entering to find.