In this cultural moment in which there is a movement toward rewriting, sanitizing our country’s racial history, I feel an urgency to write about the racial violence in my own family history. This is an undertaking that holds significant risk for me personally, as I am the beneficiary of a white supremacist society. But it feels imperative that I, at age 72, bear witness to the stories my own mother told me.

Kathy Nelson, James Dickey Prize recipient, MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and Nevada Arts Council Fellow, is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books). Her work appears in About Place, Cider Press Review, LEON Literary Journal, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review.