At Lake Rogers Park, there is a blue trail, a red trail, and a green one, too. Whether the upper or the lower, you’ll find yourself walking on the edge of water and memory, the ground uneven, roots like veins, where stories of bloodlines and buyouts, history and home, shapeshift beneath the sand.
What grows here:
Pentas–tiny, pink, and puckered closed for now–are hushed and holding secrets. Littoral zone lily pads float unbothered and unbloomed until spring comes.
Cordgrass swaying in greens and golds, whispering the names of families come and gone. Fakahatchee, forceful and full, run up to the shoreline while bold, bright green Christmas ferns blanket the sandy loam beneath the hammocks. Palmettos wide and watchful, a rustling choir of narrators each with a different point of view.
And of course, the water.
Lake Rogers invites you to hike, to listen, to learn, to glance quick and sure over your right shoulder, through the Wax Myrtle, Oak, and Muscadine, where more/different/other stories of water meeting land are longing to be revealed.
Neighboring lakes recorded and/or remembered—Raleigh, Walker, Pretty…
Named for/by Black families pioneering and formerly enslaved.
Nearby histories that make headlines for mere moments before settling back into the sunken graves across Gunn Hwy, beneath farm and barn; voices calling from behind the motel, beside the schoolhouse, and beyond the steeple.
Blue signs denote private roads, red signs with white letters threaten, no matter how clear the call of the storied and beckoning bushes, grasses, and trees.
What begs to be known here:
The careful attention to truck and dredge sand to shore–a beach of our own against the constant “No” of segregated shorelines and parks, and an inclination to define for ourselves what it means to belong, to be welcomed, to submerge into water that cools and comforts in a world that silences and shames.
Over there, my cousin in a wide-brimmed hat, a sunflower-yellow ribbon wrapped ‘round, matching the stripe of big sister’s new bathing suit or swim trunk waist band, held bunched in little brother’s hand.
Squinting through the sunshine, trilling laughter and staticky radio
Smoking grills and smoldering cigars, salty shoulders and sweet citrus
Sight, sound, smell, and taste recall a place to rest, relax, a conversation of past and present, narratives from city to country and back again, an echoing history of beautiful sun-kissed Black bodies swimming and playing in the gentle ripple, the lake’s gladness and gratitude splashing up and out, catching light like diamonds.
Sheree L. Greer is a writer, teacher, and arts administrator. She is the author of two novels, “Let the Lover Be and A Return to Arms.” In 2014, she founded Kitchen Table Literary Arts, and she is a founding member of the southern arts collective, The Rubber Bands.
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This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2025.