I Forgot That My Great Great Uncle Was Lynched.

My love of watching physics videos has taught me that I don't have to understand something in order to appreciate it, or know it's true. The fact that the sun appears to rise and fall, bringing us day and night, every day without fail (and without my permission or cognizance) is enough for me to be okay with the fact that some things (maybe most things) are above me. I read somewhere that trauma can be inherited through DNA and while the mechanics of such elude me, I accept that it's true.

This morning, I stumbled onto information that I'd forgot I knew. In a memoir that I wrote about riding in a van with eight other activists (beautiful souls) to the bowels of the country, Sanford, Florida, to stand with the family of Trayvon Martin, I read these words:

"Driving through South Carolina… where my great-grandmother’s brother, Robert Brown, was lynched on December 31, 1925 in Greenwood, South Carolina.  Incredibly, my mom (who researched and obtained a copy of the death certificate) told me that his cause of death was listed as ‘a fracture of the neck and mandible <cause> by his neck being placed between two railroad cars’.  From my (late) great-grandmother’s account, he was a 'bad nigga' who didn’t take no shit."

He was sixteen.

Re-reading the words, I was shocked with the ease with which I could forgot knowing such a thing. I assume my DNA is much more reliable. I hear words like 'fractal' and 'quantum' in my favorite documentaries and just because I can't recite their dictionary definitions, their truth resonates somewhere within me. Just like the trauma that lived within my great-grandmother and continues to exist unencumbered and recklessly in each cell, in every fractal of my being.