The Waynes and Johnsons: Albemarle County, Virginia, Circa 1862 and Beyond In 1840, Claude Wayne exerted his God-given right to his property when he relieved himself inside a slave wench named Norma. The resulting child was his, hazel eyes glinting green in the sun, a mongrel if Wayne had ever seen one. Couldn’t stand […]
Millions of Tiny Things When Hammond was very young, he had a hard time sleeping. It felt as though there were millions of tiny things crawling around beneath his skin, and the small, small spaces that separated each of these tiny things was known to him, and so it wasn’t just that there were millions […]
A Beating, A Prayer After they took the body of my friend away, I lost my ability to move. They’d left the twisted sheet he hung himself with, still tied to the curtain rod. The noose taunted me, its wide mouth ready to claim another black body. My father thought the Word would save us. […]
THE BURDEN OF DIVERSITY Every year it was the same. The then Milwaukee Sentinel printed the pictures of all their summer interns who worked at the paper. The pictures were divided into two categories: Interns Minority Interns Each year, my picture, with the worst lighting imaginable, was displayed under the minority banner. I hated that […]
202 Checkmates by Rion Amilcar Scott (from the collection Insurrections) In my eleventh year, my father taught me defeat. I sat with my back pressed on that old, scratchy brown couch. Tom chased Jerry across the television screen and then the image dissolved into a white dot in the center. I turned to see my […]
TRIUMPH 1360 A diasporic telephone memoir: Chief Dr PU Emezi as told to his daughter. by Akwaeke Emezi Read the rest of the memoir here: Triumph 1360
An interview with Andrew Mitchell Davenport In her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston writes, “If you have received no clear-cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes […]
