To My Niece, Regarding That Skeleton

Robert Allen

January 8, 2023

Child of eleven, bright red hair, first girl-child

our family has had in a hundred years,

you kneel before your overbearing grandmother.

Jennifer Louise, the crone’s voice booms,

I told you not to go into that closet.

Rice grains on the floor bite into your soft skin

while pictures from a small black photo album

race through your mind: men and women

you may not know, in suits and flapper’s clothes,

smiling faces, one like a teenage Grandpa,

oil wells and mud holes in the ground,

Model Ts and trains and faraway places.

Then, that burning cross, aglow in the night.

Men in white sheets and pointed hoods,

secretly engaged in some dreadful ceremony.

You want to run, a deer caught in the headlights,

feel disbelief, fear, guilt, revulsion, shame,

and ache to understand Grandma’s punishment.

You saw what grownups wanted to keep hidden.

Hearing your story decades later, I know

you were not at fault. Mom and Dad did you wrong.

Jenny, I cannot take it back or make it right,

but it is true, the worst thing you imagined:

Your Grandpa’s oldest brother was a Klansman.

I apologize for the things my parents did to you

in their effort to suppress and not explain

and send, though very late, a better uncle’s love.

Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and four cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the 2023 Texas Poetry Calendar, and TPA. He loves cardio-boxing workouts, hates to throw things away, and facilitates Gemini Ink's in-person Open Writer's Lab.