Two Rings on Arm
25 September 1794
Cornwall Chronicle
—Lucea
“Lost, on Sunday last from Mr. Gray’s, a new Negro woman, a Congo,
has no marks but those of her country, and two ring-worms on the back of her left hand.”
—Douglas B. Chambers, ed., “Runaway Slaves in Jamaica”
Some of my earliest memories
are the doctors—white, usually male
with polished hands.
The first comes into the exam room hurriedly
followed by a gaggle of students
to observe with their own eyes
my skin’s misconduct in response
to the varicella vaccine,
given to me because, like my father,
I have not yet succumbed to the virus,
that small part inside of us still
resistant to colonial contagion.
“The negroes are particularly
susceptible to white man’s maladies,”
men would posit for centuries in
their annuals and journals,
the doctor injecting my arm in
an attempt to correct
the ungoverned.
Overnight, my skin at the injection site
balloons into a baseball-like sphere
of perfectly formed pustules,
like a glandular organ exposed to outside air that
was meant for another space,
perhaps protected somewhere
between my cushioning serous membranes.
The next comes when the ring blossoms
on my upper hip as a teenager after
I returned from Italy.
The nurse looks at it and frowns in disapproval,
“That’s ringworm.”
My dermatologist later shakes his
head in dismissal at her supposition,
“They think everything is ringworm,
let’s see what’s really going on,”
though to his dismay,
his skin scraping shows
nothing of interest,
nothing that would
be eased by pill or potion.
This is the dance I am forced
to perform over decades,
the deep cystic acne that leaves residual
marks long after the toxic medication
dissolves their stubborn trunks and
peels off layers of my skin onto
my washcloth,
the plate-sized, magenta marks
that appear suddenly on each
of my upper inner thighs
during early adolescence,
a preemptive branding of sorts that makes
another doctor shrug and
prescribe oatmeal baths.
Amidst all of this are the
constant burning hives
that erupt sporadically,
after the humiliation of
high school gym class,
my face a flushed tomato of hot welts
as I burn my skin with acne pads,
trying to make the
crimson color disappear.
In adulthood, the hives bloom
each month during those days
when I feel my body
harness all its power,
the progesterone channeling up
through my skin’s layers and creating
small circles, welts, and dots
stoked from the volcanic
heat in my chest,
spreading through
my entire body and
up to my face and neck.
When the tide dissipates,
the welts retreat
but leave behind small red flags
in their place,
my body part of a tagging system
without elucidation.
“We need to biopsy those hives to make sure
Nothing sinister is going on,”
another doctor says, though each month,
the hives would somehow
vanish before the appointment,
a strategy gleaned from
my ancestors.
Finally, there is the new pigmented line
that appears on my thumbnail,
one physician positing a vitamin deficiency,
the other eager to use his sharp hole-punch
to carve out the bony, pulpy matrix,
leaving behind
my disfigured hand,
a trivial aftereffect.
I don’t know it at the time,
but in the corner of each of the exam rooms
are my predecessors,
standing silently like diplomats
from Benin & Togo,
Nigeria, Ghana,
Cameroon.
I see them now,
my foremothers from West Africa
whose blood I share,
with me during those
countless doctors visits,
their own skin marked
with scars from skin diseases
caused by the feces, pus, vomit, urine,
and other contaminants
that tainted them against their will.
They stand behind the doctor
as he inspects my body,
their eyes holding mine
during these intimate moments,
their adept brown hands willed into stillness
though they instinctively long
to reach for plant leaves,
to pound them together
with oil and apply them robustly,
my skin finally registering touch.
I imagine their feet and hands
riddled by chigger bites,
overseers charitably providing them
with small knives
to cut out the affected flesh,
their toes amputated if deemed necessary.
I see one of you, who
after exhibiting
the first signs of smallpox,
the tiny bumps beginning
to erupt on your mahogany skin,
being quarantined to
a small room at the bottom
of a ship with tiny bits of
food and a dirty blanket.
Days later,
you would be tied to a chair,
blindfolded,
gagged,
and lowered
into the Atlantic,
the paradox of holding the reparation
in your hand and absurdly letting
it slip away,
the need to debilitate
overriding the
capacity for
humility,
the girl knowing
what they could not conceive,
that the remedy is what
they most feared –
exposure.
“My skin is your skin,”
I want to say,
“And if I must weather these breakouts,
I will not wear them as a millstone.”
Instead, they are my ornate gold necklace,
once ripped from us before we were
purchased and forced naked upon the ships,
or
they are the large metal earrings
that I can carry on my crown
with ease,
we who used to line our heads
with banana leaves to support
the cumbrous loads,
too heavy for feeble
Caucasian skulls to hold,
though they
try.
And if I have the
privilege
to wear this insubordinate skin,
I will wear it as a testament
to the living diaspora of my body
that was never afforded
a chance to acclimate,
our bodies
shackled above the Atlantic waves
between the time zones
where they forced us to dance,
out of the shacks where they kept us
starving on salted herring and mackerel.
I will let it be the centerpiece around
the conference table that
I am forced to share with those
whose forebears
held the ropes
that lowered us
into the abysm.
It will be my colloquy,
and I will smile
when I watch our captors’ eyes
glance toward my
neck and chest,
then quickly look away,
as though protecting their eyes
from direct sunlight.
And I will say nothing but hold space,
my body transforming into a map,
its scars standing up like the marks of
those countries,
knowing,
now,
why every evening
I must apply perfumed oil to
my body and hair after
scrubbing it with a coarse,
white cloth
before instinctively
sitting outside and
looking west,
watching the sun slowly lower,
blooming with its most magnificent colors
that only come after the sun sets,
after the physicians have gone home,
after we lay their babies down to sleep,
before it finally dips
below the shoreline,
into a beautiful,
deep darkness.
Katharine Chung is a writer and librarian. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her poetry has previously been published in Down in the Dirt, Italics Mine, The Word’s Faire, and Wildroof Journal. Find her on Instagram @vegancinephile.
Innisfree 42
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