WALKING MAMA HOME
One of our writers, Jeffrey Bernard Sanders lost his mother earlier this month. During our meeting, he read the piece he wrote for her service Ripp Walked Mama Home in his rich baritone. Last week, editors Matt Reyes and Nolan James Briden attended a memorial video conference for Matt’s Stepdad. Prisons abolish the sustained act of parenting — the holding of one’s child, the holding of one’s parent. It tears the heart until meaty scar tissue forms as families adjust to separation. In Oregon, nearly 70,000 children have one or both parents behind bars. The numbers are skewed toward African-Americans (1 in 9 children) and those children who fall low on the socio-economic scale (1 in 8). Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people are disproportionately incarcerated. This crisis in families leaves children at-risk to follow suit which ensures intergenerational trauma and incarceration. Keeandre Scott’s Tears of My Ancestors calls for ending this cycle.
Father August by Phillip Luna follows the patriarchal line of his Mexican ancestry as he considers his relationship to language and culture. For many of us, we write to imagine what it was like for family members who crossed borders and social boundaries so that we might be born “with options and prosperity.” Wrapped alongside this story of his great-grandfather and the generational passing of the family name, Phillip Luna writes about his own son, and the inevitable transfer of life from one generation to the next: “On an abacus we slide beads left or right and count the sum we’ve gathered, but while we are counting our additions, another side has diminished. The beads in motion, solving an equation, always seem to move left and right. I watch the former wither and I worry what it means when no more beads remain.” Each bead that slides across the abacus, the days that Phillip spends away from his son represents another lost opportunity to watch his son grow into a man.
The count structures prison life. Every person must be physically counted several times each day and night. Oregon’s constitutions stipulates that prisoners must also account for their time with hours served working or participating in programs for self-improvement. And of course, prisoners keep their own count — time served, time remaining, time until they may hold family again…and finally, personally accounting for actions that brought them to prison. | TDS