Julia McKenzie Munemo
author and freelance writer; earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine
Late one night the winter our children are nine and twelve, I settle on the green couch in the den of our rural New England farmhouse holding an old softback book in shaking hands. Its title is The Wrath of Chane, and the teaser copy promises “the most shocking portrayal of slavery ever written,” but the image under those words reveals a tale as old as time. There’s a tall, muscular black man trying to pull his wrists apart, but his chains won’t allow it. He’s got no shirt on and his pants are unbuttoned. A white woman in a yellow dress with carefully curled blonde hair clings to his arm and gazes up at his face. I keep looking at the author’s name and trying to pull out a memory from the distance. I know it’s one of my father’s pseudonyms, printed there on the cover of this thick piece of pulp, but I can’t remember ever hearing it spoken out. Tonight – with my family sleeping upstairs – I open it for the first time.
My father wrote this book, and I know very little about my father.
Right away I see the name of my mother’s mother penciled in the right-hand corner of the first page. It’s handwriting that brings back birthday cards and grocery lists, handwriting I haven’t seen since childhood. My father’s mother-in-law didn’t just keep this book he wrote, she marked it as hers. Laid claim to his work, even when it was slavery porn. Her tidy name in the corner of that brittle yellow page softens me to the book, softens me to my dad. It allows me to begin.
from The Book Keeper by Julia McKenzie Munemo (Swallow Press)