News at Eleven: I wander now

among names of the dead:
My mother's name, stone pillow for my head.

That image is real because my mother does not have any kind of stone on her grave. That sort of hit me, the history that had not been properly memorialized, remembered, tended by someone native to her -- it was my mother's history. She was just like those black soldiers. No monument existed, and in that way she was erased from the landscape.

from Bookslut: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey

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