Managing Editor Zoa Coudret on today’s bonus short: This story positions “the happiest day” of a white couple’s life next to the injustices and cruelties of racism—as memory, as inherited trauma, and as a persistent oppressive force. The collective voice creates an immersive setting, and powerful sentences throughout the piece made me want to linger in every moment.

A PLANTATION WEDDING

The ancient oaks that line the walk will be trimmed with fairy lights.

The white bride in her white dress will stand beside her white groom and smile wide with white teeth as they pose for pictures on the lawn. The photographer will tell them to hold each other. Kiss. It’s the happiest day of their lives.

Bridesmaids and groomsmen will watch and applaud dressed in hoopskirts and waistcoats—pictures of the genteel south.

We will watch from the eaves.

In the kitchen, the staff of Ms. Maybelle’s Soul Food + Catering Service will sweat over steaming trays of okra and yams, collards and corn bread, macaroni and cheese. Finger lickin food served on silver platters by black hands in white gloves.

The waitstaff will glare from the kitchen as guests mingle in the parlor on the refurbished hardwood floors. They will admire the craftsmanship. These old homes were so well-built.

Others will tour the grounds escorted by guides. They will tell them about the estate. How the fields once burst with cotton and sugarcane reached the sky.

We will listen from the soil.

The guides will take guests to the quarters, burned-black cabins with no doors and dirt floors. The guests will run their hands along the walls lined with mud and paper clippings. They will be surprised to see them still standing as if the same damn hands didn’t build the manor.

The cabin will be decorated, set dressing for the show. A bed in the corner, a rocking chair, a pot in the fireplace. The guests will find it quaint, cozy.

We will watch from the corners of the room. We will remember hay and mites and cold. We will know the pot was always empty.

Inside the master’s house we will watch from the walls. Watch our kin shuffle in and out again, still burdened. In the kitchen, we will wipe the sweat from our kinfolks’ brows. We will marvel at the whites of their eyes. We will spit the ashes from our hollowed mouths into the pots that simmer and hiss. We will try to force knives into our family’s clenched fists and tell them to fight.

The party will move from the house to the lawn. Stomachs full, the guests will dance and drink and laugh. They will rejoice in each other and beauty of their lives. The bride will throw her bouquet. Rice and rose petals will rain down. She and her groom will ride away beneath the bowed boughs toward a shining future.

Along the tree line and woven amongst the branches, we will witness and weep.

Brianna Johnson's stories have appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Gigantic Sequins, The Molotov Cocktail, Wigleaf, Kenyon Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. An alum of the Tin House Summer Workshop, she is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, O. Henry Prize nominee, and Best Small Fictions nominee with work longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. An MFA graduate from The University of Tampa, she teaches college English in Orlando, Florida.

Tip the author on Venmo: BriannaJohnsonYC23