Impetus/Impetere: The hauntologies of slavery

128 hile at a dinner party in New Orleans on October 22, 2017, a seer named Sarah Barnes whom I’d just met days before in Alabama asks me, “Can I tell you something ?” Says she can see everyone’s ancestors, guardian spirits, and for some reason mine are coming through clear with a message. Says something like, “They’re all men. They all stand one by one in a line without end, with one hand reaching forward to hold the shoulder of the man in front. They all stand like this—a link—until they get to you.” in flint, Michigan,duringthesummerof 1995,Isatatakitchentable eating something, or doing something, playing with something, essay Impetus/Impetere The hauntologies of slavery Jonah Mixon-Webster W IMPETUS/IMPETERE | 129 when looking down and without reason I reach over my chest to my right shoulder and find fingers, a few knuckles, then the entire hand. I shudder-slink and look back and see my mother at the counter a few feet away; spinning my head forward, I see my sister at the table sitting before me. No one else around. The next day in New Orleans, after I wake, Sarah writes to me: “Your guardians appeared to me in a dream. They all stood on the walls of a wooden room around your mother. A question was asked before I arrived. But then next, your mother placed a baby Moses in a basket, and that was the only answer.” She had no way of knowing that my father’s name is Moses, so I took the dream and ran with it. Hungry for the vision and its tattered sight of box-braided figures, signaling the causal chain of my body and its namesake of settlements. And how can I not see any of this as a call toward lineage and other intimacies, given that the majority of men on the Mixon side of my family were some type of nonexistent —either never-born or dead. Uncles, grandfathers, other cousins, would-be brothers, etc., and nowhere. In time since, I still imagine them—a clear, recursive folding in my headframe—a sheet of Black specters after, and most certainly, before me—in warped wading hymn-haw—waving. on december 5, 2019, I drive to Ann Arbor from Lansing to meet another man—another African American in his thirties named Marc, who ends up inviting me to go to Africa with him while he’s on the continent for work. Two weeks before Marc and I met for the first time, I dreamt that I was riding in a jeep with a man who looked like him, and that we were so distracted by laughter that we ended up crashing into an African safari kiosk. This seems like another unction to go along with, and we arrange for me to meet him in Dakar, Senegal. Moved by the anticipation of going back to Africa for the first time, I begin to further look for and uncover the histories of my body which have been lost through the machinations of slavery and abandon. My mother had told me that during the 2015 All Mixon Family 130 | JONAH MIxON-WEBSTER Reunion (a reunion of the Black and white Mixons) it was discovered that our family originated from the Mixon Family Plantation, which was first located in South Carolina and then, via additional government land grants, spread to Alabama. Searching for as much information as possible about the plantations, I discovered the last will and testament of Micah Mixon, the founding patriarch, and the slave narrative of Eliza Evans, a formerly enslaved person on the Mixon Plantation in Selma, Alabama, documented through the Federal Writers’ Project. I draw my eyes all over and through, back and forth between the texts, endlessly possessed, imagining— unable to see otherwise— From the Will of Micah Mixon Darlington District, South Carolina March 14, 1805 In the name of God Amen. I Micah MIXON of the State of South Carolina in Darlington District Planter Being in perfect mind and memory Thanks be given unto God calling into mind the mortality of my body and knowing that it is appointed for all men Once...