Dear Virgil,

The night ebbs on as sleep wanes. What sordid acts led to such restless ease? A past life? The former Selves. Or past lives? The previous renderings of my animating force. Perhaps generational sins, those passed through DNA. I feel the burden of my lineage. The accountability of restoration. The work of repairing what my ancestors wrought.

I wonder if you know already?

Lewis Wetzel, the frontiersman known for his prolific slayings of Indigenous People during the Westward expansion and colonization of Turtle Island. He was my father's former pride, progenitor, and now his brutal joke.

While investigating potential matrilineal names we could honor by changing our last name, my father revealed to my partner and me that Lewis Wetzel is in our family tree.

"That's the only famous person in our family I know about. Not necessarily what you're looking for, though."

He was a vicious man, allegedly known as "Death Wind" by those he hunted and considered too hateful by even his peers. His crimes against the Indigenous made him a wanted man among the settlers, but no matter how many times they imprisoned him, he escaped. After moving South, he died of yellow fever because he refused medical care, ensuring he would never pay for his murders on this mortal coil.

This new knowledge sits atop the remnants of my apathy—the bits left that I only feel when I am the most overwhelmed, the moments I am shut down, isolating, and nearly convinced into hopelessness. The wrongs of the people who led to me compound. My family. Whether Lewis is our ancestor or not matters very little. My father believes it, his father believed it, and his father before that. Inherited slant. Inherited pride.

What act(s) in my lifetime will be enough to repent for another lifetime(s) spent slaughtering, Virgil? With no land, no money, and no assets, my options narrow. Direct mutual aid is what I have and what I do. So, I do more of it? Tell me, do you see the material needs of the people? Do you see the squalor, the abject poverty, and the world's suffering?

We speak late when nightmares, apnea, or insomnia hold my sleep hostage. My question is, do you see it the way I do? Or are you merely reassuring my spent thoughts so that I might rest again?

Do you know it's the Beast that keeps me up at night? The system, the manifest destiny that inspired the sins of Wetzel and his peers, and the colonial expansion of it all.

Currently, I'm a bandaid on a gaping avulsion. Le petit bourgeois. Radicalized with no stamina, no organization, and no plan. The wet dream of a fascist oligarch wearing a Rolex worth more than my debts combined. That's over ninety thousand for an education in asking questions, only to utilize a capacity for critical thought when convenient and act on it even less.

That must be why I'm here, this liminal space between waking and sleep. It's not just the arbitrary and futile attempts to "save daylight." It's the ghosts.

Lewis isn't the only violent racist I know of in my family. Lawrence– my mother's father– may have been too old and tired to do anything but grind my tiny kid knuckles together or threaten me, but it was enough for me to know he hated anything different from him. As I aged, I learned more about his past: his resentment of his hometown, Detroit, and the people living there; the abuse he subjected his family to; and his fear of losing power or control.

He kept his homemade baton by the door of all of his homes. Each one after he moved to Pinckney around '65, Evart in the 70s, and Florida after that, until it ultimately became an heirloom in the mid-90s after Lawrence died in Big Rapids. I'm assuming my father selected the piece to keep, as I can't imagine my mother wanting it, and it is in his possession now... By the door. When asked what it was, he called it my "grandfather's beatin' stick." I asked him why he kept it. He did not have an answer.

He uses the steel-plated tip to bang the door of his new trailer twice at the frame, just below the lock—a quirk to shutting it properly.

That doesn't explain why he's had it since 2002.

His interest in it may baffle me, but what I do know about him offers me some peace. As a collector, I suppose he sees an artifact, whereas I only see the violent tool of a violent man. It carries a painful legacy that needn't be repurposed or cherished.

"Throw it out."

When he dies, he says. He uses it for the door right now.

I must attempt to sleep again, dear friend. I'm warped and wrapped in my thoughts; they no longer mean anything. My tired mind and perhaps your tired eyes cannot make for significant discourse.

Until another watchful night,

Dante