Forgiveness is a Seed

“An enslaved African woman, unable to prevent her children’s sale into slavery, placed some rice seeds in their hair so they would be able to eat when the ship reached its destination…However, as they disembarked the slave ship, the planter who eventually bought them discovered the grains…and demanded to know what they were. The child replied, ‘this is food from Africa.’ This is the way rice came to Brazil, through the Africans, who smuggled the seeds in their hair.” —Judith A. Carney, With Grains in Her Hair

Forgiveness is a mirror unhiding all your war-torn fragments, is your seventeen year old reflection daring you to glance away while your eyes never shift focus, is sitting still on the counter of your high school dorm bathroom as your friend takes a pair of scissors to your chemically damaged hair, is fallen shards of hair that can mar flesh but are somehow too dull to slice through the skin your Spirit wears, is a tapered cut, is a visit to the beauty supply store to buy natural hair care products, is a handful of deep conditioner lathered through your kinky type 4 coils, is a twist out, is a wide tooth comb, is learning that time can forge the most ordinary things into weapons, is your eighteen year old reflection realizing for the first time that your tiny afro is no longer a thing of joy, is recognizing when care turns into burden, and burden into apathy, and apathy into barely audible loathe, is letting your insecurity play loudly until you are able to trace its source, is accepting that your curls don’t fall the way you want them to, don’t wash and go so seamlessly, don’t look like hers, is the quiet before victory, is your nineteen year old reflection comforting you with words unsaid, because when you listen hard enough, even silence begins to sound like an apology.

Forgiveness is the elderly woman who slips through your door frame two nights after you turn twenty. Fingers gray and rugged, she sits you between her thighs, lays rice seeds on your scalp, weaves cornrows so measuredly into your hair, as though each braid is a secret family recipe, a passed down blueprint to freedom. This is all we could take with us, she says. The clothes on our backs and these rice seeds. This is all we could take with us. She extends her wings, feathers white like the wallpaper of God’s throne room. A traveler enroute to her next harbor, she disappears through the slit of your window. Alone and less aggrieved, you sit up in bed, tilt your neck like this, like that, and find that seeds encircle you. In the silence, guilt retires, as echoes of the woman’s voice rush to fill the void. She leaves you a message: Forgiveness is a seed and freedom is its tree in bloom. With little hesitation, you gather the seeds surrounding you in one hand, a pair of scissors in the other, and you greet yourself in the mirror. In your reflection, a decision awaits: to prune or to plant. In other words, forgiveness is one wielded weapon away, or forgiveness is one sown seed away. Either way, forgiveness is yours, and I tell you, in time, freedom will make its home in the palm of your hands too.