Shattering glass echoes in my ears, snapping my head up from my phone. Right across the street, the front window of Diaz’s Deli— the neighborhood bodega—lays in glistening shambles on the hot sidewalk. The store alarm blares out catching the attention of
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“If y’all weren’t so difficult, maybe it’ll be easier to get a man.” “Y‘all? Difficult?” I repeat the triggering words as if they can somehow mean something else. They sting differently when they come from a man who shares the same melanin
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The day Chiamaka disappeared, her father left the house in precisely three pieces. The first piece left at sunset, when the world, consumed by endless night, became his sworn enemy. A cowardly enemy at that, who only struck among shadows and darkness,
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The Traveling Refugee. She watched her ancestors burn and hang. In the land of the free. In the land of the brave. They have known many graves. Unwilling to be 6 ft. under. She travels 6,000 miles abroad. I was fully prepared
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It is 2014. You are a Nigerian living in the United States. You are the parent of a U.S.-born child. The immigration authorities have given people like you the label of resident alien. This is the third country outside of the land of
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I. Places that I am terrified of returning to: Shitty $49-a-night motels with dingy sheets and showers overrun with mildew smelling of sweat, cigarettes, and desperation; the backseat of a 1979 Cutlass parked in the dark alley between the corner store and
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“I love your hair. You did it yourself?” “Aww, thank you. I wish. I can’t cornrow.” “Wait, you’re a little Black girl and you don’t know how to cornrow?” Correction: I’m a whole 30-something Black woman who doesn’t know how to cornrow.
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“Then [Noah] sent out a raven, which kept going to and fro until the waters had dried up from the earth.” Genesis 8:7 As a child, I wanted to change my name. This desire was not particularly novel; children sometimes want to
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Hair like strong twine, sweet like the harvest of a California grape vine, to stop the spread of your smile is the worst crime, voice melodic like summer wind chimes, spirit divine, little Black girl I love you all time. My mother,
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“My name is Tavonne Carson. I’m six years old.” If she hadn’t said my name, I wouldn’t have believed the little girl calling from the speakers of the old boom box was me. Steady and brilliant, that voice spoke to a part
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The girl you ask to dinner will never show you her true face. Her deep, caramelized skin is carefully concealed beneath layers of formality and mistrust. She runs through her standard list of questions in her head as she is seated across
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My story will be faithful to reality, or at least to my personal recollection of reality, which is the same thing. The events took place in the Fall of 2018 after a Michael and Janet Jackson themed lip-sync competition at Sidetracks in
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I guess I’ve been an art historian, informally I’d say I’ve always “geeked out over art,” since my teens in San Francisco. I didn’t know the official title of what it was I loved because I didn’t know that “art historian,” as
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I hear my student say that word and I’m not surprised. I knew this student was going to say it because this student is clueless to the world; he knows only what he has been brought up to believe. He was raised
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