Égalité (40-40)

Lillian Deja Snortland

There are times when soul-weeping is all one can do. Rage bubbling forth like a geyser from the stomach, the chest, the throat: a roar. Riverbanks eroded, a rush straight down the middle through the heart of everything and out. A pure rain.

*****

During a bitter tennis match, at deuce, we share a final signal with our doubles partner; the player at the net might put their hand behind their back for our eyes only, a pointed finger down to the left or to the right, or one thumb up, meaning that after we serve, we’ll rush the net in a mutual show of intimidation, ready to volley. Body tense, prepared by weightlifting and sprinting, poised for glory—

We lose. Our dad puts his big pale arms around us. We’re shaking uncontrollably.

“It’s okay to cry,” he tells us.

Knowing that no one will see us, loud, ugly, air-sucking sobs wrack our body, and our face, likely even browner than usual from our season of tennis, is finally wet.

Love-15.

With nerve pain from neck to shoulder, we don’t play tennis often anymore. When we open our racket case, we feel the unravelling grip tape, rough from use. We warm up at the concrete courts in the acres of Druid Hill in Baltimore—land which in 1652 the Susquehannock Indians ceded to Lord Baltimore. There used to be “whites only” clay tennis courts there, transformed into the glass halls of the Rawlings Conservatory, which now houses a corpse flower that smells like a cadaver when it blooms briefly once every two or three years, a flare of time much more fervently desired than memories in hundred-year-old soil.

15-15.

Tennis is a sport about breathing through the precipice, equal parts control and elasticity. Neither running ahead of time nor being swept up in it. A tennis swing is like a hook to catch flitting silver minnows that flash in the corner of our eyes and then disappear.

Breathe. Grunt. We bounce our ball once, twice, three times in preparation of an explosive serve.

30-15.

The crowd, hundreds of people, scream at a clay tennis court, Sunday, July 11, 1948. Four men and four women—Black and white—play a simple game on a “whites only” court in protest after years of Baltimore City police pointing Black folks back to their own dilapidated courts.

30-30.

A violent slice shot. Our opponent slides across the clay. Their ankle looks like it should break, but it doesn’t.

The Gee’s Bend quiltmakers, from deep in Alabama’s rural Black Belt, clap and sing a song as they prepare a geometric quilt piece for our parents to bring me as a gift. A signature on the back says “An Open Book” in honor of our degree in creative nonfiction.

The music, from the mouths of strangers, is intrinsic and indomitable, like a current of the Patapsco River, washing away our lactic acid. Their stitches suture our muscles. We can fight on.

40-30.

Enslaved Africans grow fish peppers near the Chesapeake Bay to stave off joint pain.

Nicholas Rogers plants his trees on the lands of the Susquehannock Indians, frees his slaves, constructs a mansion, and passes the land to his son, who sells much of it to the City of Baltimore.

The fish pepper disappears from gardens. There is a brief ellipsis before they are rediscovered and preserved by African American communities. Stubborn as the seeds tend to be, they’re never truly gone, even when mistakenly labeled, or their roots purposefully hidden.

After we walk across the stage and receive our diploma, our parents take us to Woodberry Kitchen where we splash their red Snake Oil hot sauce, made from rejuvenated fish pepper crops, into our oysters and soupy beans that we eat with buttery brown bread.

Deuce.

Or “Égalité!” as an announcer of the French Open calls out. Égalité, defined in many ways: the characteristic of that which is equal; equality of the forces present; equality before the law; equality of two numbers; a balanced equilibrium in one’s humor.*

A battle of wills, or vigor, or patience, of an eagle eye sensing blood at a pulse to tear open from across the court.

Break Point (Ad-In).

As we drive to our cousin’s property in North Carolina, past horse barns, though our cousins have never ridden, the similarities between houses are dizzying. They weigh down earth that used to be a plantation, acres of hiking, a golf course, and a pond for catching frogs, now places to sleep with the skeletons of our foremothers.

We catch tennis star Naomi Osaka’s interview after her French Open defeat.

She’s built up something high and fallen low. “Literally I don’t know why you guys are always so kind to me,” she writes in an Instagram post about Nike, who sponsored her style.**

Points are continuously wrestled every day, bleeding into games, into break points, and so on, clay courts staining knees coppery.

On the news, a little girl’s silhouette in Gaza crosses a backdrop of flames—our daughter a shadow across our sun. Olive trees ripped out. Cruelty salting stubborn lands, fertile with hope and desperation. A plantation-turned-resort in Louisiana burned down this year, to the land below, an edifice razed, but a truth revealed: our earth is tilled by clawing brown hands, holding up a history threatening to bury them. They only want air, as we all do.

As we write this, we look up from the page and see our train, en route back to Baltimore, pull away from Selma station.

In Eugene, where we grew up, our mother continues to grow heirloom fish pepper seeds in her garden. A path of transference, of sorts, for a history we too often disconnect from, and the history to which our mom tries to call us home. A fire resides in the hearth there, in the past, which we have trained our bodies well to tend, stroke by stroke, on the verge of a flash fire.

* The definitions of égalité are from dictionnaire.lerobert.com/definition/egalite.

** You can find Naomi Osaka’s quote at instagram.com/p/DKJ216jKt2u.