Essays by Black Women Writers | midnight & indigo

A Divine Inheritance, Unmade in Brooklyn

Takeisha Parks — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:44:34 +0000

My teenage daughter, the middle child of three, is curled up at the edge of my bed, complaining about today’s theater rehearsals. Apparently, students are getting yelled at because it is two weeks until showtime, and too many of them are struggling with their choreography and lines. My kid, a brilliant mind cursed with perfectionism and anxiety, is not happy about this and is unloading all their frustrations. And I am snuggled in bed, getting all of the tea. The lead hasn’t shown up to practice in weeks and is half-assing the performance. Nobody knows how to sing and dance

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Like The Wind Rolling Off The Drums

Mariah Maddox — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 11:33:40 +0000

I speak in tongues all the things too glorious for language, too acapella for melodic song, my brown body be the wind rolling off the drums, be the sweet cruise of my mother’s hums. — Beckoning of the Wind: An Ode to Motherhood I grew up seated at the feet of my grandmother’s reminiscing mind. Her recital of past remembrances was ritual, something I now realize was her way of saying I was here, and I lived and loved, and I fought, and I have the wounds to show you. Her wounds have been carried by many of the women

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I Got Mono (and Not the Fun Way)

Ebonie Ledbetter — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 04:00:53 +0000

In my best Sophia Petrillo impression: Picture it: Harlem, 2007. Gentrification creeped its way into the historically Black neighborhood, but a decade would pass before a Whole Foods popped up on W. 125th Street. George W. Bush was in his second presidential term, and absolutely no one thought a Black politician named Barack Obama would become his successor. Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” blasted from speakers, long before the rapper would wear Make America Great Again hats and praise Adolf Hitler. Apple released its first iPhone that summer, forever changing mobile technology. Beyonce topped that year’s Billboard 100 with

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You Forgot to Delete This

Jessica Edmond — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 02:22:31 +0000

The screenshot stayed. Not where I could see it. Not where it could be dealt with. It lived in the cloud, that quiet place where things linger after people decide they are finished thinking about them. I found it months later, long after treatment ended, long after the urgency wore off. I was scrolling through my photos, looking for something ordinary, when it appeared. A familiar face. A familiar hand. My phone reflected back at someone who knew it well enough to unlock it without asking. Someone in my family had been scrolling through my phone while I was sick.

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The Devil in the Paisley Dress

T.D. Carter — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:12:39 +0000

The smell of bergamot grease and hot iron always brings it back—the sticky, humid pulse of an Alabama Sunday morning. At five years old, my world was a haze of golden-brown skin polished with coconut butter until I shone like a new copper penny. In the kitchen of our Chambers County home, Aunt Mae reigned over the stove. The scent of bacon drifted through the house, thick and salty, colliding with the rich, bitter perfume of “grown-up” coffee. To me, that scent was the smell of opinions and secrets. I longed for a sip of that dark chocolate gold—adults and

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The Grammar of Loneliness

Opal Palmer Adisa — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:11:22 +0000

I am seventy years old. Seventy. The number itself feels solid, a hard-back bounded volume, yellow with age, storied with other out-dated volumes, seldom requested by researchers. And while seventy is not ancient—I have every intention of living into my nineties, maybe even beyond, as almost all my family members have—it is a threshold for which I am not prepared. Like really…when did it happen? How have I arrived here? One moment I was fifty, still sprightly, still raising children, still leaning into desire and possibility. Then I was sixty, and I thought, Yes, this is good, I can hold

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On Delicious Forgetting and Being Invited In

Lauren Lluveras — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 22:48:12 +0000

When I’ve told the story about my cousin’s wedding on a plantation to other Black people, the first question (always asked about the bride) is, “Is she?…” Yes, she is. My cousin, Afro-Puerto Rican, like me, married someone white and their gorgeous celebration was hosted on a plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. The lovers were married right along a river bend, once home to rice paddies, and the reception partially took place inside a remodeled barn that was once central to the labor an enslaved population performed there. Huge oak trees framed the ceremony, their branches heavy with Spanish moss

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I Ain’t Eeemuch Say Nothing: Spiritual Psychosis or Paranormal Magnet

Melanie A. Jones — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 04:00:59 +0000

I wiped your ass before you knew you had one. I didn’t say one mumbling word while sitting on the toilet, but I heard her voice just as clearly as if she were in the room with me. After watching a medium’s TikTok on spirits walking among us, I pondered—again, on the pot; panties and pants around my ankles—exactly how much of me do they really see? Coming from generations of habitual line steppers and boundary crossers, privacy was only needed if you were up to no good and self-advocacy was disrespect that could end with a backhand worthy of

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Recipe for Hope: A Listener’s Guide to RAYE’s THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE.

Quintessa Knight — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 23:34:26 +0000

I met God at a strip mall conjunction of a liquor store-jazz club-Baptist church. Well, not really. It felt like I did at the time; I was actually in a Taco Bell parking lot crying into a chalupa and drowning my feelings into a tequila spiked Baja Blast over a breakup. That, piled onto some terrible job news, it felt like there was nothing in my thirty-something years of existence I had yet conquered or figured out in life. At that moment, my playlist decided I needed some religion and provided it in the form of Genesis by RAYE. It

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Gracie, Becoming a Whisper in Plain Sight

Danielle Martin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:00:40 +0000

“Have you eaten? “Do you have money?” “How are you getting home?” “Do you say your prayers?” These simple questions once evoked such agitated eye rolls from me. The soft pitch of notes gliding into the air, like the chorus, of a song on repeat. Words dangling in the tranquil space, between my grandmother and me, will be no more. Grace, or Gracie, as she began calling herself, embodied the essence of her name filled with quiet strength and endurance. Her silence, masking the savage volcano that could erupt when provoked. But somehow, Gracie always survived whatever life threw

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