<sup>No right is more precious in a free country

than that of having a voice in the election

of those who make the laws under which,

as good citizens, we must live. Other rights,

even the most basic, are illusory if the right

to vote is undermined.

—Justice Hugo Black, 1964</sup>

Sometimes she wrote about the weather—

how hot it was, or yet another lightning storm

gone as quick as it came. In the catalog

of her days: a dress she was sewing, car trouble,

pay day, laced with declarations of love

to the man who would become my father—

her body bright with desire, a threshold

I would soon cross into being. Two years

before Loving will make their love

legal, my mother writes about marrying

despite an unjust law; and because it is 1965,

Mississippi in turmoil, she writes about a cross

burned at the church next door, interracial

outings at the beach, and being followed

by police—all of it side by side in her letters’

tidy script. Reading them, I can’t help thinking

how ordinary it seems, injustice—mundane

as a trip to the store for bread. And I know

this is about what has always existed,

side by side, in this country. That summer,

my grandmother brought The Movement

home. It tells the story in pictures, and it is

beautiful, my mother wrote, adding, I think

you know the way I am using the word.

On the cover: a black protestor, caught

in a cop’s chokehold, his mouth open to shout

or gasp for air. Inside, pictures I could not bear

to look at as a child: a man tied to a scaffold,

his body burned blacker, the fire still smoldering

beneath him; two boys hanged from a tree

above the smiling white faces of the revelers

turned back toward the camera: a young couple

holding hands, ordinary as any night out

on a date. Now I think of my mother, in love

and writing love letters, cataloguing her days,

those terrible/beautiful pictures on the table

next to the crocheted lace doily and crystal bowl

my grandmother kept for candy: butterscotch

in cellophane wrappers, bright and shiny as gold.

It is July 20th 1965, two months before my parents

will break the law to be married, and my mother,

who’s just turned twenty-one, signs off—her rights

basic as any other citizen’s—Have to run, she wrote;

Got to get downtown to register to vote.