Was all the world I'd known.
A child there, I was hers, Miss Nancy's kin,
no matter this skin, these eyes belonging
to his face. Your father could not
look at you without seeing disgrace
was the only answer she'd relent to offer.
Even when her life waned, she would not
unlock the past, tell me what she'd said
that made him let us go, why he paid
and paid to send us away and away.
We left first for Kingston, and a door
closed behind us, a door
I was never meant to open again.
In Kingston, my grandmother was passed off
as my slave. By the time our ship docked
in Greenock, she was my servant, and we
threaded into a tale, so tightly
woven no one would guess my origin.
What she sacrificed was everything
of herself to see me freed. But my father?
You kent him and his world so intimately
what I've surmised will be no surprise.
What Douglas understood was expedience.
I was simply evidence. I needed to be erased.
SOURCE: No Ruined Stone, narrative poetry collection by Shara McCallum, first published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd, UK, 2021.
Also published by Alice James Books, USA, 2021.