A Recipe for Okra Soup
Fix in your mind the hands of your father’s mother. How they were the hands of her mother and her mother’s mother and how those hands may have touched indigo and rice on the plantations that lined the sandy hills that were once the ocean floor from which you came.
- Remember. Remember that you are of your father. Remember that your father is of his mother. Remember that his mother is of her mother who is of her mother who was of the low country where the sandy hills that now stretch along the South Carolina coast were once the ocean floor.
- Fix in your mind the hands of your father’s mother. How they were the hands of her mother and her mother’s mother and how those hands may have touched indigo and rice on the plantations that lined the sandy hills that were once the ocean floor from which you came. And think of her skin salty from sweat and blackened by sun, body bent into the shape of a U as she cut down rice.
- Count on your thin-skinned lady fingers the number of times the spaces between her ribs cried out for rest.
- Go back to your garden where you are growing okra—six plants so far, each one unfolding to receive you in the morning with your thin-skinned lady fingers and your U-shaped body as you wish it into being. Call forth the hands of the hands of the hands of the mothers you never knew and yet somehow know.
- Read a book that awakens within you memories that do not belong to you yet have somehow imprinted themselves in the underlining of your skin. They are of you but not you. You cannot remember when they became a part of you but you know that they are a catalyst for your being and becoming and undoing. You know that the undoing is a rewilding—a return to a wildness that you do not yet know, or maybe you do.
- Find yourself wanting to go to the soft and wild sandy hills of the low country because every grain of sand is a seed of your origin, every splash of saltwater a sip of your lineage.
