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63 Self-Portrait as a Moment in 1963 Supper’s late, and my mother sprawls before the console, half-watching Gunsmoke, Alabama History spread before her, though school’s almost out for summer and the chicken’s almost fried to that perfect crisp. Then it’s over, credits stamped over final stills, and the show gives way to news, a minute of film from Birmingham, not an hour south, where police are turning dogs on kids as young as she, spraying them with hoses until they fall, the water she isn’t watching curling like smoke in the air. My grandmother flicks the switch and they’re gone. They eat in quiet, each cutting a breast or thigh into steam, forking beans or macaroni until the plates’ blank faces shine again. 64 This is years before she’d meet my father, before I’d come to that table, that food, that room. There’s a silence here I want to scratch away so I can see what’s underneath, what they don’t recall. I want to turn someone’s head, my grandfather’s maybe, or my mother’s, back toward the tv, where the tube’s still fading, the ghost of that scene on the edge of that room. I want someone there to see and remember, so I can leave and go back into the future, not history. Not yet. ...

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