My elders had seen everything there was to fear, and they knew that the power that resided in man was not the power of God. Because of them, I know what wisdom means and the gentleness of humility, and I know what only a communion with the dead can tell.

On Easter vacation in April 1968, I stood with my mother at Martin Luther King’s graveside, in quiet peace, recalling the anger, horror, and dark teary shine of a people bereaved. No longer did the most horrid things exist only in fairytales; it was the land of the living that now frightened me.

White children finally arrived at my neighborhood Negro elementary school eighteen years after Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education (1954) brought an end to school segregation with all deliberate speed. New books and fresh paint, traffic lights, and a pedestrian crosswalk arrived with them. Silver posts arose too with square yellow heads: crossing lights, like sentinels to be the guardian of white children.

“Blood done signed all our names,” my daddy said. My thoughts turn to my sixteen-year old cousin’s 1974 murder in sight of her high school, where, five years earlier, black girls would never have been, of how her death was publicly marked, and of the alchemy of emotions I felt as connected to what was then—and to all that was unsaid.