A Map Is Only One Story

A body always returns to the place that shaped it. A body always returns to its ghosts.

“A map is only one story. It is not the most important story. The most important story is the one a people tell about themselves.”

Every African visitor or immigrant knows of that white family who would seek your adoption and treat you like their own. This magnanimity they also extend to stray dogs and cats and iguanas.

Maps are a polite fiction. They never tell the whole story. They don’t mark important things, like graves or genocides.

Violence comes from all sides, at any moment. No land is secure, and no border truly stable. History creeps, and it breaks.

Home is not an answer to a question.

When is a white person just doing their job, or having a bad day, or just being drunk and not being racist? When are whites just being kind?

A map is only one story. It is not the most important story. The most important story is the one a people tell about themselves. •

I think now, daily, of what death said to the drowning girl: “You drown in three feet or in six, matters not to me.”