She Carried Me 7 Miles

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It was cold that night. I remember hearing her heart racing. It felt warm being pressed against her chest.



"Lord, why'd this chil' do this to this baby?" she repeated over and over.



She kept walking. Her breathing was heavy.



I tasted blood.

When I was 24 years old I started having this dream once every other night or so. At first, I had this dream only while I slept. And then, the dream started coming to me in the form of flashbacks. The woman was my grandmother.



In speaking with my grandmother about the dream, she said, "I'm surprised you remember that, you couldn't have been anymore than about 5 years old when that happened. Your mama just beat you somethin' bad."



The neighbors heard my screams and thought they were worse than usual. The routine was to call my gramps for help because police didn't care about the black kids who lived behind the train track. We lived in the houses that still had the tin roofs and the outhouses. This was 1977 in southern GA. We were so close to the train track that when the train passed by the house shook. Police, fire trucks, and paramedics did not drive in our area to tend to black children who were beaten by their mothers.



My gramps carried me to the hospital. It was 7 miles from my home. They bandaged my broken arm and sent me on my way.



On the way home, my gramps, I heard my gramps say for the first time, "Don't you worry baby, God will take care of everything." I would hear my gramps say that so many times before I left home in 1991. It wouldn't be the last time she would carry me through a crisis.