They do not love your neck unnoosed and straight.
―Toni Morrison

From the ceiling, rows of stones hang, heavy with names: 

General Lee, hanged for knocking on a white woman’s door,

John Stoner for suing the white man who killed his cow,

Mary Turner, with her unborn child,

for protesting her husband’s noosing.

This place remembers 

four thousand in four hundred counties

between 1870 and 1950.

I look for the county where my mother grew up

and find none of the lynchings

she heard whispered about

in the churchyard, Sundays.

Four thousand, a fraction.

Photograph of white men and boys, their solemn faces,

bare black feet floating above them.

I can’t escape the youngest child’s gaze.

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