Almost, But Not Quite

I.

My mama

was taught to say

Columbus discovered something.

My grandma, too.

Same lie,

different desk.

They called it progress,

said the past was primitive.

Said our ways—

our herbs,

our hush-hush songs,

our morning libations poured onto dirt—

were just superstition.

Not science.

Not real.

I watched my mother fold

the parts of herself that sounded

too Geechee,

too wild,

too much like moss-covered memory.

She ironed her accent until it laid flat,

called it “professional.”

She meant "safe."

But at night—

she still rubbed mugwort on my feet when I had fever.

Still whispered over my braids,

"No bad dream gon’ take hold dis chile tonight."

The textbooks never said that worked.

But it did.

II.

My grandma—

before the stroke slurred her stories—

used to say things like:

"The wind got voice, baby. You just don’t hear it till you quiet."

"Never eat eggs when the moon weepin’."

"A turtle don’t run but it get there clean."

My teachers said,

“That’s not English.”

I said,

"Then what is it?"

They never answered.

But they gave me red marks,

told me to rewrite history

in the voice they gave me.

III.

What they don’t know is—

I come from a line of women

who remembered

with more than their minds.

Memory lived in their backs,

their wrists,

their hips while shelling peas.

Their silence was not forgetting.

It was protection.

Even when my mama said:

"Don’t tell them you see spirits."

Even when my grandma said:

"We ain't s’pose to talk 'bout da Root."

Even when I told my teacher

my great-aunt knew which babies would die

by the shape of their feet,

and they told me I was disturbed—

I knew.

IV.

In school,

they handed me maps

with borders that cut through old homelands.

Handed me dates and wars and doctrines.

Told me that my people were

relocated,

reclassified,

re-educated.

But they never told me

how a song survives across three generations

of silence.

How a woman hums under her breath

in a whitewashed hallway

and suddenly her grandmother's bones

rattle in the rhythm.

V.

You want to know the thing

I wasn’t supposed to say?

Here it is—

I remember.

Not all of it, no.

Some of it’s smudged.

Some I got wrong,

just like my mama did.

Just like hers.

But some things refused to die.

Like how a pine tree cries sap

when truth gets cut.

Like how the land pulses

when you step where a story still lives.

Like how, in Gullah, we say:

"Ebry ting ain’t meant fa da book."

Some truths ain’t supposed to be proven.

They just are.

VI.

So yes—

I passed your test.

I wore your speech.

I hung your degrees on my wall.

But I still bury sweetgrass in my pockets.

Still hear names in the rustle of oak trees.

Still taste the ancestors in red rice

and corn that don’t grow straight.

I still believe

in the things you said

weren’t real.

VII.

And when I have a daughter—

I’ll teach her both languages.

The one they gave me,

and the one that lives

beneath my tongue like a drumbeat.

Because the hardest thing to say out loud is this:

They almost succeeded.

Almost.

But not quite.