Free Bird

Right now my biracial three-year-old thinks Africa is a place he can find on an old laminated map of the Bronx. He knows what a flag is but not what it’s for. He doesn’t know what it means when, after leaving a park on the outskirts of my family’s hometown in North Carolina, we see an oversized pickup truck sporting two Confederate flags, one at each corner of the cab. I don’t know what it means, either. When I was growing up, a white mother with a biracial child might push the child’s head down at a stoplight to avoid getting hassled. My olive-skinned grandfather used to tell me a joke about God having burned black people in the oven. White people, apparently, were underdone. Black people: burned; white people: half-baked. Got it.  

My son’s first words to me this morning after opening his eyes: Prove it. In the past two days, he’s become very excited about the Indian buffet; the concept of gravity; his sense of sight (I’m using my sense of looking! Look out!). Pulling up to the Indian buffet, he lets out a series of yells. Are you excited about life? I ask. Yes! he replies. How does it work? 

This morning, at the breakfast table, he says something that sounds like “free bird,” so I start singing Skynyrd to him, the words I know, which are not many. He turns his face to the window then, the sun illuminating the traces of paint on his face I thought I’d washed off after yesterday’s art project. He bares his teeth in some semblance of smile plus warrior grimace, keeping his eyes closed even after the song has ended, taking a sun bath. Finally he opens them and looks at me, holding my eyes with his own while telling me about it. I took up the sky.    

Joanna Penn Cooper is the author of a book of lyrical prose vignettes, The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press); the poetry books What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press) and Crown (Ravenna Press, winner of the Cathlamet Prize); and several chapbooks, including Wild Apples: A Flash Memoir Collection with Writing Prompts and Celebrity Ghost: Comics, both from Ethel Zine & Micro-Press. Her next full-length book of prose and poems, When We Were Fearsome, is forthcoming from Ethel in 2027. She lives in Durham, NC, with her impish 13(!)-year-old and a cat named Oz. Find her on Substack at Muse with JPC.    

This essay first appeared in Talking River Review (2017).