Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays From Georgia’s Geechee Coast
Neesha Powell-Ingabire
Neesha Powell-Ingabire, whose memoir, Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays From Georgia’s Geechee Coast, was published by Hub City Press in September. (Credit: Keamber Pearson)
How to Divide a Coastal Georgia Town
1. Pour the bones and flesh of three hundred eighty-eight thousand West Africans into eighty-two quintillion gallons of saltwater. Bring to a hard boil, turn down to a simmer, cover with a lid.
2. Sprinkle the resulting concoction throughout thirteen colonies in the western hemisphere of the world. Yield fields of rice and sea island cotton by the marshes and waterways of the ancestral home of the Timucua peoples. Name this area after the duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Germany. Stir in ample doses of bondage, domination, hangings, whippings, and rape. Grow this institution like kudzu.
3. Chip away at the kudzu with slave rebellion, abolition, civil war, civil disobedience, and Reconstruction. Resist with disenfranchisement, segregation, and mob violence. Hose down burning crosses and burning homes.
4. Pretend the Confederacy lost and its supporters are dead and gone when Confederate symbols are still alive. Pretend a twenty-foot-tall Italian marble monument of a humble Johnny Reb hasn’t stood in a Brunswick, Georgia, public park for one-hundred-twenty years. Bury the reality of the town’s four-hundred-eighty-foot-tall bridge named after Sidney Lanier, the Confederate poet.
5. Serve empty promises of equity after three centuries of systemic racism.
6. Spark a fire after a white man murders a Black man in Brunswick for running for exercise, then for his life, through a subdivision a mile and a half from his own front door. Stoke the flames with anger, confusion, and fear. Debate whether the Confederate monument should be removed out of public sight until you’ve reached gridlock. Marinate in the indecision. Drive a knife into the rift. Let the laceration bleed.
Excerpted from Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays From Georgia’s Geechee Coast, copyright © 2024 by Neesha Powell-Ingabire. Published by Hub City Press. All rights reserved.
