When I was 5 my sister found me marking out all the black children in a Sears catalogue of playground equipment with a big red X. She told me later in life that in that moment she taught me this wasn’t something we did to people…X them out. I don’t remember that moment, nor do I think there was any notion in our family that we didn’t like black people. What I do know is that it is unlikely that there were many black people in our neighborhood, or in our school, or in our…anything. Unconsciously as a child I understood from my environment that black people were different from me without being told so. Somehow I recognized that they weren’t part of my community, and because of this they were not invited to play on my Sears catalogue playground. They needed to be X’d out.
???In 2033, I woke up as a tree, happy as I can be, and found out what I had been missing???
I have decided: to be reborn as a hearty sapling, raised by a forest fam — into an excellent tree! She will be called…