Dear Girl

A letter to the body that gives and is never expected to take

Photo: Zanel De Lange/EyeEm/Getty Images

A Guyanese family begins and ends with a mother. Tenement yard mother. Coolie mother. Negro mother. Mother who cooks. Mother who cleans. Mother who bathes her brown little children. She lathers their hair with a cake of Blue Soap, fingernails digging into scalps, scrubbing away days of lice, sun, and dirt. Mother never recoils. Her children…