Ash and Echo

Most of my mother’s people are buried in a cemetery in the Alabama community of Perote. The graves lie in the ground adjacent to where a church once stood. There are hundreds of graves there, but it still always felt to me like an impromptu place that became “official” over time. I remember weekends accompanying my mother and aunts to clean off the graves and leave fresh plants or flowers.

On the other side of the highway from this burying ground lies the white cemetery. Yes, even in a community as minuscule as Perote, Alabama, white folks thought that their dead selves and our dead selves should not mingle. They lie in a burial ground on a hill, I guess so they can look down on us from heaven’s penthouse.

I’ve often wondered if those white people envisioned a hereafter were black people still cook their meals and clean their houses and rock their babies and pick their cotton. When the chariot swung low, were the black folks sitting in the back?

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his “Meditations,” talks often about checking yourself. You ain’t all that so don’t get full of yourself. No matter what your accomplishments or the contents of your bank accounts or the color of your epidermis, in the end we are each just a few pounds of dust and maybe a name that we hope will be remembered.

Ash and echo. Dust and memory. Even our name is but a sound, a vibration that needs the vocal cords of another in order to live again

But then vibrating energy is what existence is, isn’t it? So, we are making the universe even as we are passing through it. We are necessary to the life of creation.