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By Savala Nolan Trepczynski
She must have known, on some level, that she was going to be killed. A gang of Texas Rangers approached their small space, the horses pushing the dust and the pale faces of the riders focusing. They believed (wrongly) that he was harboring a black man accused of a crime. They asked (or deflected) to enter the space and look for it. But she said no. She refused to let them in, perhaps because she felt brave and provocative, or terrified and vulnerable. Her husband was working. I was alone with the young and visibly pregnant. She said no and one of the Texas Rangers fired her gun. He shot him through the mosquito net door in his space. The child in his womb is also dead.
She’s my great-great-grandmother and I’ll say her name: Laura. I first heard her story years ago from my father and his sisters, who told it with sadness, anger or just patience, depending on their mood. We don’t know how Laura was born in Texas in the 19th century, but we do know that her mother was born in Alabama after the Civil War; before the war, the circle of family lineage is engulfed by the slavery of property. The beginning of Laura’s life is a mystery, however, I have an idea of her death every day, the loop of her murder playing in circles: the sound of horses’ helmets, the porous shadow of the mosquito net door on her body, the smell of gunfire, the pool of blood on the porch, the young men crying inside.
I’m thinking about Laura for Breonna. Breonna Taylor, another black woman shot dead in her home through white men who had state strength and impunity. I cried Laura, whose genes live in my body and my daughter’s, because I cry to Breonna, whom I never met, but whose unwavering disappearance makes me familiar. It’s like I know her. No, my pain doesn’t compare, not even a little, to what Breonna Taylor’s circle of family and friends endures; however, the same terrible and endless garment of racialized and sexist violence also envelops my heart.
The relentless and continuous violence opposed to black and dark women stuns me. In the United States, this racialized, finisher-based violence begins with the genocide of indigenous women and their children. It continues the trafficking and enslavement of blacks, and the way slave owners have repeatedly, carefree and cruelly used the bodies of black women to create more people to traffic and enslave. This continues with Breonna Taylor (and many others) and the many tactics in which our state and culture continue to damage, desecrating and end black femininity. I think of our disproportionate representation in prisons, foster homes and maternal death.
None of this surprises me: slavery, the root from which we still push, demanded the violent contempt of black women and their bodies. Otherwise, “raising” and promoting enslaved youth would have been unthinkable. Slavery itself would have been unthinkable. No, no wonder. But it eats me alive. In fact, he’s eating us all alive. This, as William Faulkner said: “The afterlife is never dead. It didn’t even happen. Or, as James said, “the genuine horror is that America adapts all the time without becoming anything.”
Unlike my ancestor, who had at least a moment of will-free before he died, Breonna Taylor had no chance of saying yes or no to the officials at her door asking, with a ram, to come in. the grace or respect that is intended to be created at home, in American jurisprudence. In moments of hope, I think, “If only it had been the day! If only she had opened the door and spoken to them! However, I wonder if it would have made a difference. Once the shift officers saw her in her darkness, will what she did or say keep her alive?
I think about this fatality with Laura, my great-great-great-grandmother too – is it possible that she has replaced her fate through the pregnant state on her porch and talking to the police? Would I have liked her to say to the Rangers, “Yes, come in” and open the door with a mosquito net? Do I dare think that if she had said yes instead of no, maybe she would have just lived, maybe we would have had a satisfied ending? No. Because I think the Rangers would have killed, raped or hurt Laura and her children, no matter what she did. I think his one-word act of resistance was fatal, but I also believe that his own structure, his black femininity, made him a goal. I think, in other words, that Rangers would have killed Laura even if it had been a genuine, docile and polite, just because they saw a black woman, and maybe just. I think they would have been afraid of their darkness, and they would have had a perverse appetite for their femininity, and they would have overcome their power, and they wouldn’t have been able to control themselves or even believe why they deserve to do it. I think that’s essentially why Breonna Taylor died too.
More than a hundred years separate those two deaths. But within the framework of black and dark women, time becomes paint in another way. Beyond and provision crumble in others. The long run turns out to lead to things we’ve already seen. In our bodies, the history of American linear progress is more mythical than real. Of course, there’s a way to check the progress made: the check is whether the men who killed Breonna, unlike the men who killed Laura, will be responsible. I think of my great-great-grandmother, Breonna, my little girl and my niece who are only girls, and I wonder if the long term will rid us of the darkness we have known or deliver us without end.
Savala Nolan Trepczynski is the Executive Director of Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. His collection of race and genre essays will be through Simon and Schuster in 2021. Follow her in @notquitebeyonce.
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