Family Archives | midnight & indigo

This too, Is a Kind of Death

Chisomaga . — Mon, 25 May 2026 01:08:13 +0000

Memory has a wicked sense of humor. I used to think it was gentle—that it visited in fragments, a picture here, a sound there, like small kindnesses. But, it never visits politely; it barges in, drags up chairs you did not set and sits down with you, and insists on retelling old stories. Mine always starts in Enugu. I was nine when I moved into that house. People called it a family friend’s home, but really it was poverty’s living room. Poverty was the main tenant; the rest of us were subletting. It crouched in the corners of the kitchen,

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Food, Memory, and the Body: Song to My Mother

Jahia de Rose — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:26:53 +0000

The smell of warm basmati rice bubbling on the stove brings me back to my mother. In my mind, she is wearing the dull red apron which means business—or the denim blue one which replaced the red one, once it became too stained and frayed from decades of cooking down the house for parties and the dinners we used to share as a family. Or, she is reading The Wind in the Willows alive into magic for my sister and me by the lamplight in our room; my mother makes the voice of Mole lilt with his characteristic gentleness and

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Gumbo

Tara Christina — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 05:00:47 +0000

I made Gumbo with my son Sunday. It’s not the first time I made it for him, But it’s the first time he helped. I told my son, “I’m gonna teach you how to make a roux from scratch.” “Okay, what’s a roux?” he asked me. “It’s the base for the gumbo,” I said. We began. Me: “Can you get the flour please, then the olive oil.” I pulled out the cast iron skillet. I poured in the oil, Then the flour. “Here, now you whisk,” I told him. He whisked “Is this good mom?” “Yes baby,” I could hear

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Sweet Peas at the Edge of Grief

Brittany Hector — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 05:00:07 +0000

I can name every note of the sweet pea’s scent. Like most girls, from a young age, the delicate beauty of flowers was enrooted in me. “Sweet Pea,” I was always affectionately called by my mother, whose own birth name meant “violet flower.” While too soft for some, I earnestly cherished this second name and relished in the connection it forged between us. Many afternoons as a kid were filled with backyard flower picking. Floral dresses were my wardrobe anchor. And during the growing years of teenhood, my signature scent was “sweet pea” perfume—a recurring gift from my mother. A

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Wigs, Wine, and Wisdom: A Tale of 1960s Black Sisterhood

Toya Qualls-Barnette — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 05:00:56 +0000

Auntie Cee was a real boss, a Human Resources specialist with swag back when Black women were ghosts in corporate board rooms. No blood relation, but as much family as anyone who shared my bloodline. Mom, an insurance agent, met her when they both worked at a Fortune 500 company in the ‘60s and halfway through the ‘70s. Their commonalities and differences molded a journey of lifelong friendship, not without cracks. Besties who stuck together like magnets to metal. Auntie, from a close-knit brood of twelve brothers and sisters, decidedly single with no interest in traditional family life, had never

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Summer Sister

F.A. Battle — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 05:00:34 +0000

“Here I come, slowpoke!” Even though she was behind me, I could tell Tonya was smiling. Grinning in that nice-nasty way she did when she was getting the best of me, pretty as a picture and laced with venom. The words buzzed around my right ear like a mosquito, making my jaw twitch. I swatted to shoo the irritating tickle, only to find an even more disturbing sound beneath it. The pap, pap, pap of Tonya’s sneakers hitting the pavement and getting louder as she closed in on me. The noise threw me into a panic like a monster was

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A Glint of Amazing Grace

Angela Carole Brown — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:32:46 +0000

Autumn, 1978. The Jonestown massacre had just splashed across the nation’s newspapers, and my mother protectively drew her family into her bosom in an almost hysterical way. Her career in local government often took her away to conferences, and this time she was due to be the keynote speaker at one in Atlanta the week following Thanksgiving. She usually left us home to hold down the fort, but this time decided that the whole family would go, take off early, and make a little holiday vacation out of it. On Thanksgiving morning, we piled into a roomy, rented twenty-six-footer RV

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But I don’t want her to be sad

Cy White — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:10:23 +0000

Hey, hey, hey! You’ve reached the phenomenally favored and fantastic ______! It is her mantra every month. A cadence like daytime television, like weather that’s going to be sunny on the West Coast, with perfect skies and the perfect amount of wind to keep things pleasant. She steps into this role because she must. Because as mother, she believes that doing so will make her… My mother and I are headed to the magical pink Candyland of Dallas, Texas, where Mary Kay consultants, directors and internationally renowned bedazzled, Pepto-pink juggernauts known as Nationals converge

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Nanny’s Cry For Me

Shonda Smith — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 04:00:58 +0000

I never saw Nanny cry. Not even when her humble, eat-off-the-floor-clean basement apartment flooded repeatedly. Back in those terribly inconvenient days, it was normal for all of us—especially my mom, sister, and me—to worry profusely when the weather forecast called for rain, especially heavy ones. We knew any hint of a deluge meant my poor Nanny was in for a day or two of mopping those black-and-white, faux marble, linoleum floors, along with managing garbage bag after garbage bag of trash removal, and prayers for a dry season. A seamstress by trade, my Nanny knew instinctively how to patch things

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when i was just a little girl

Tina Scott Lassiter — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 04:00:32 +0000

when i was just a little girl… …my paternal grandma taught me to cook what she called succotash. her recipe read – – stew canned tomatoes with chopped onions, seasonings and skin-on, bone-in chicken (‘cause skin & bones add flavor) until the meat falls off the bone; add freshly shucked corn and lima beans; simmer until the beans get soft. she put some bacon fat in hers, something i decided to forego as an adult, not because i don’t indulge in a little pork every now and again. i just don’t have that canister of bacon grease that both of

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