Sarah Nell White Goes Home | Melissa McEwen

First published in The Litchfield Review, 2007

Sarah Nell White Goes Home

Tomorrow she goes

back to her town – the town
where she lived as a White.
She hasn’t been back in so long,
she has forgotten the names
of roads. Maybe it will come back
to her the second she stands
in the kitchen of her childhood.
She will fall back – easy -
into her native dialect like she
never left. Sometimes, here, in the place
where she lives now as a woman,
no longer a White, she slips up,
says things that are foreign
to her children. But there, in her town,
everyone will get what she means
when she says, “eem.” Her old ways
will rise up, take over, and dominate
when she sits down at the kitchen table.
She will be a White, again, and the
ring on her finger will be just a ring
she won at a fair and not the wedding
ring that cut off her circulation
and her original name. Carried away
by this freedom, she will walk
out the door and all over her town
not like an outsider asking where is,
but like she never split, knowing
the way to go – ruled by her feet
because the muscles in her legs
did not forget.