Frances
You were a woman who rarely sat, I imagine,
but in this photograph, you sit,
all four feet eight inches of you.
Erect and powerful as a queen,
requiring no one to look
to exist in that chair.
But you were not of royalty.
You were the mother of ten children.
And in your eyes are a two-bedroom house,
600-square feet, in Old Sixth Ward,
where you would bear and raise children,
live with sisters and brothers
and their children,
sometimes cousins and distant relatives.
You were quiet, and gentle.
But in the set of your black eyes
(which would turn cataract-grey)
and the determined fix of your mouth,
you carry the knowledge and strength
to survive the loss of your son Joe
who’d drown in Buffalo Bayou at 12 years old.
You carry the knowledge and strength
of being an indigenous Mexican American woman
with the audacious dream and determination
to see her brown boys go to war, come back alive and then
university,
to see one daughter attend a music conservatory,
and another daughter to study with the most prominent
painter in town.
You carry the imagination of turning the means of a blacksmith
into generations of scientists, lawyers, bankers, business people,
educators, writers, artists and thinkers.
Look at you, holding water-colored red flowers in your right
hand,
letting it hang, a sprig of purpled wildflowers decorating your
breast.
Your black hair let down to hang along
the back of your white dress
to the legs of the chair.
Your feet dressed in hardy pointed boots,
staggered with your legs crossed.
You own the chair that you sit on
and are the owner of all that will come to pass
for our family,
long after the time of this photo circa 1910,
a young bride at the brink of creating a history
with her own hands and body.
Looking right at us in the eye.
Don’t come here
with that foolishness.
Bring what I made of you.
“Frances” by Leslie Contreras Schwartz, from her collection BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA (FlowerSong Press, 2020)
