Inventory of a body or, Ledger of the _____ on land

I am not aware of who made me. Not in a cosmic, genetic, psychological sense. My name is not my name is not my family's name is not my family's history, but a wresting of it from a linear timeline. But there are charters of my people and their history, wills in which they are the property, documents that are part birth certificate, part household inventory. For Sale notices and Runaway bulletins and unmarked graves where strip malls and roads are now.

The sins of the country are the sins of man are the sins of God, who is inherently sinful. Whose name means sin and not the cleansing of it.

And it is sin that we pass from daughter to daughter, from woman to woman, who carry the sins of themselves and the men too proud to carry their own.

Sins as heirlooms.

Sins as legacies.

Sins transformative in nature until they become the blessings and keepsakes of women.

June

Would rather dance with the devil than shine another goddamned fork. Would rather stomp through the halls of This Damn House and let candles leave their wax puddles and let dust cling with tight hands to flowing drapes. Does not eat mush or cornmeal or caught squirrel but resigns herself to scraps from plates that look gold in golden light.

When she runs, she does so in spectacular fashion—in the middle of the day when a fire breaks out in the cook house. She goes with Joseph and Netty and in the ads for her she's

the negro woman named June, aged about 19 to 24, ofordinary size, is of light complexion, much freckled, with very black eyes and straight hair, heavy with child.A reward of twenty dollars will be paid to any personwho will bring her home.

Marva

Mulatto. Small-breasted and uppity. Could pass for white if she had the heart for it.

Sarah

TO BE SOLD

1 Wench, Sarah, Young Woman of good character, used to House Work and the nursery.

Elizabeth Ann

Her mother did not name her and so she could not love her the same as the others. Her love didn't curl around her name as it spooled from her tongue in a yell, in an angry whisper, in a sharp reprimand. The language she spoke to her was Anger because she was not her child in a way that counted most. In her head, she called her ____.

Polly

is a girl of six who looks too much like her master to ignore, so the mistress, childless, keeps her as a pet, away from the children and indoors when the sun shines too hot, and when she sleeps she does so curled up on a cot on the floor of her bedroom, far from the warmth of her mother's side.

And then Polly turns seven and her mother is sold and her mistress has a baby, a pretty blue-eyed girl who will grow up to be a miss and then a mistress, unlike Polly who grows into Wash Woman Polly with gnarled fingers and a bent spine.

Kitty

Kitty is shaped like a mother, round and soft with strong arms and a weary back. Usually there's a baby strapped to her or tucked away safe in her belly and another picking worms from the cotton leaves or sitting by Old Martha's feet. The lighter ones stay in the shade of the house, up on tiptoes to dust shelves and down on bony knees to scrub floors.

When her oldest, Nathan, runs off, she's not surprised, only a little hurt he didn't tell her first. She doesn't cry. She saves that for when he's brought back in those thick iron chains that look made for a horse and he's crying for her and she can't do anything but watch, watch as they take his wrists and tie them to an overhead beam in the barn, watch as they strip him naked as the day she...