Minnie Story Watson The First
Miss Minnie Story Watson.
It has a ring to it,
don’t you think?
She sounds small
but tough.
Resilient and fragile.
Proud but also fearful.
She’s not afraid of hard work,
no, not Minnie Story Watson.
She’s afraid of being forgotten.
Of being folded into the past
alongside other women
whose names we no longer remember.
We lost them along the way
as we rushed to be somewhere else
and then forgot how we got here,
why we exist or what makes us who we are.
Minnie Story Watson knows all about that.
She forgot herself.
She doesn’t know anything
other than the pine-tree-studded forests
of McDuffie County, Georgia
where she lives with her family on a cotton farm.
On a warm summer night with a light wind from the south,
Minnie Story Watson believes she can smell the sea.
