The Plantation

Secret literacy, ashamed humility beyond known, established perimeters of ancestral lines; haunted by the ghosts of murmurs from one empty window to the next confided that the mothers maintain humanity - their children, sanity.

Lucrative sustenance like cigarettes at the gas stations and corner stores - may the stench, may the clouds sate this generational starvation.

Bread and grits - butter from the final pint of heavy cream. Gravy made with the last of the Winter's ration of beef.

Backwoods crisp like the paint peeling off the doors; met by the mist of the early morning draft and agitated by hot, languishing summers.

Words and their meaning only gain and multiply; segregation losing all but one reply - its legacy starkly reminding of the term "historical districts" and the mentality to say it implies.

"Homes", apart from their antiquity, alienating - Isolating - an attempt to quarantine imaginary stigmas.

Rows of walls of rotten wooden planks. Whole sectors of broken, crumbling, wooden shacks.

No dining tables.