No Equal(ity) by Susan Lin
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from Southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella Goodbye to the Ocean won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over fifty different publications. Find more here.
Author Foreword:
Shortly after writing this poem, I was browsing the archives of IHRAF Publishes and noticed the magazine had previously published a different poem about the Sugar Land 95 (“We Remember” by Debbie Cutler). I hope my words can offer another perspective on the same cruel history. I grew up in Sugar Land, Texas, and lived there for 22 years. The city motto was, ironically, “There is no equal.” We went on field trips to the nearby Imperial Sugar refinery as children; as teenagers, we were told that our schools were built on former sugarcane fields. We all knew that Sugar Land used to be a prison town. But it wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I learned the full unsavory truth behind our community’s saccharine name. Anyone interested in reading more can find in-depth explorations here and here.
They razed sugarcane fields
to erect the bones that formed
our neighborhood schools, but never
taught us the truth buried in the land:
that the bedrock of our education was built
over unmarked graves of slave laborers;
that the skeletons of those incarcerated souls
might never be uncovered as the town flourished
and the foundation spread.
Living bodies spilled out of buildings
too small to contain their growing numbers,
so the grounds became a perpetual construction zone.
Annex after annex: classrooms where we learned
about nearby prisons and factories led to cafeterias
where we sprinkled crystals from sugar packets
onto our palms, unaware of the invisible chains
that stretched across the passage in between,
unaware of the trapped past at rest beneath the soles
of our small feet.
