By Carolyn O'Neal. My cousins are beautiful. Dark eyes, shiny black hair, and cheeks as full as the sunset. When I look at their photographs, I pretend I’m looking in a mirror. I pretend I have a face that people want to see and a body that will fit into white dresses with pink ribbons and matching shoes. I run my fingers across the images of my beautiful cousins and I don’t feel like I’m living at the bottom of a well where every sound echoes off barren walls, cuts my skin, and hurts my ears. 

“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt