When smoke remembers

Today marks 61 years since Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, Addie Mae Collins, 14, and Cynthia Dianne Wesley, 14, were killed when a bomb that was planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

It was Spike Lee’s documentary “4 Little Girls” that took this historical event out of being just another generic, civil rights reference and gave it life and breath and story. He interviews the family members left to mourn and remember these little girls. We learn about their interests, their style, their dreams. We learn their humanity in a way that we cannot forget, in a way that becomes part of you whether you want to or not.

To think this only happened 61 years ago as we continue to navigate this violent country.

This is such a critical time in the United States but when is it not? As I spend time in Georgia, a state close to Alabama, I reflect on how even though I was born and raised in the south, my experience is a different version of what it means to be southern as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants from Miami—a city where Spanish is the first language.

I think about how much money my parents spent on my education, yet it wasn’t until I went to graduate school, that I learned anything relevant to what it means to be born in America. These deliberate omissions, these efforts to estrange Americans from American history in all its rawness—the bones, the blood, the blown up churches.

But truth refuses to stay quiet. It manifests is the constant noise of America’s contradiction—bibles and baby wives, gangsters as politicians.

Denise, Addie, Carole, Cynthia, you are in the smoke, under the skin.

We will see what remains.