My Mother the Lunch Lady
       

Each day at 8 a.m., my mother the lunch lady works the assembly line of newly made meals each a stamp of mass, scratched from the unlimited land of heather and sunflower risings. She reaches home at 3, after a day of patriarchy whose offspring depend on her, to be coddled, each her presumed favorite. A maid at school. Her face erased from her colored, marked body—universally misseen, misnamed.

After school, I watch her, in her bedroom, removing her school clothes, collecting her uniforms for the wash. Her handkerchief shaped like a doily on her uniform's lapel, with the name Dot inside. I don't know her as this woman, a Blackwoman whose birth is tied up in her labor. She labors for the small coins, to use her Blackbody as surrogate for elevated white women, who insist she nourish what their whiteness has wrought. Manage their childish fears, miss anne said, be hattie, be the wind, be mammy for 8 hours while they are in preparation for future domination. They have the power my mother could not imagine. At home Dot is taking what is not really quiet time, but in the slimmest of single moments, within the enclosing generational chasm of servitude and place, in these moments she belongs to no one.

She says it is her nerves; she needs ("unrespected" moments) to fight for her life in a life, where she is owned by the state, her husband, her daughters, the church, the community, who says that she is the very nice lady with a smile who exists to serve lunch at this unintegrated school. The lunch lady with cancer, cancer that silenced, sunk her until she retreated with her voice. The labor, the Blackfemalebody she couldn't corral, but succumbed, when home meant gone.

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Copyright © 2022 Cynthia Parker-Ohene All rights reserved
from Daughters of Harriet
The Center for Literary Publishing
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission