WHAT REMAINS — DW McKINNEY
/After the garbage truck hauls away the tea trays my grandmother cannot pack and a man claims the house and land that had been ours, I scroll through the real estate listing online to see what remains. There’s too much Black history in the photos. Fifty years. It’s caked into the red brick fireplace and lines the1960s floral wallpaper. Outside holds the greatest parts of myself, so I dwell in the backyard.
The earth is exposed and muddy brown. The sun has chased the grass to the far corners of the yard. Tufts lay huddled along the fence line spitting out planks like rotten teeth. But I can still feel the Kentucky bluegrass underneath my feet. The stiff blades served as a wedding altar for my mother and stepfather. The grass cradled tangerines when I stripped them from the trees and they rolled from my hands. The once unending blanket of green caressed my stomach as my first child poked her way forward from inside me.
There’s a haint somewhere in that yard. The listing photos don’t show her, the Ol’ White Woman, my grandfather called her. The nape of my neck would prickle as I peered out his den windows. My eyes skirted the shadows for fear of seeing her there, formed from my panted breath gathering on the dusty window panes as I stared into the twilight. That Woman was my woman.
My sister’s longtime friend who lives in the neighborhood says a Filipino family now rents the house from the man who discarded my grandmother’s belongings, things folks would call vintage or antique. I imagine the Ol’ Woman floating in between the barren trees, offering her mournful elegy for those of us who can no longer hear it. Would this new family hear her cries and call her by another name?
But the Ol’ Woman is still my woman. I want to lead her by the hand, take her down the road, and show her where my grandmother now lives—where she too belongs.
DW McKinney is a Las Vegas-based writer whose work appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Bitch, Mom Egg Review, and Narratively, among others. Her writing has also been anthologized in I’m Speaking Now (Chicken Soup for the Soul, 2021). A recipient of the 2021 Shenandoah Fellowship for BIPOC Editors, her nonfiction was a finalist in Hippocampus Magazine’s 2020 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction. The founder and current instructor for We Are The House: A Virtual Residency for Early-Career Writers at Raising Mothers, McKinney also serves as a nonfiction editor at Shenandoah. You can drop a line on Twitter @thedwmckinney or at dwmckinney.com.
