In this powerful mother-daughter exchange, Summer Knight and Kwaneta Harris reveal how nearly a decade of forced silence through solitary confinement shattered their bond—and how they’re fighting to rebuild it, piece by piece.
“Everything I did in my daily life, I’d wonder how Mama was doing the same thing in that hole. Was she cold? Could she see the sky?”
“How do you compress motherhood into five minutes at midnight? How do you explain to a child why you’re not calling on her birthday, her graduation, after her father died? … Without communication, we became strangers. She grew up with a ghost for a mother, and I mothered a memory.”