Memoir
1. Abiding Metaphors When I was three years old, I nearly drowned in a hotel pool in Mexico. My earliest memory is of what seemed a long moment, as if I were suspended there, looking up through a ceiling of water, the high sun barely visible overhead. I do not recall being afraid as I »
Memoir
“The sky had lightened. It was then that I realized that not only did I not have any idea where I was, but that neither did anyone else. Luis was not the least bit concerned.” I’ve never wanted to get married, but if I ever did it should probably be to Luis. I can’t even »
Memoir
“Unsurprisingly, there was no conversation around my dinner table as a child about the racist politics and actions of the Kitchin brothers.” Let me lay all of my cards on the table: my ancestors were not just bystanders but prominent figures in the ironfisted white supremacist tyranny over the black citizens of Halifax County, North »
Memoir
“Though race is not present in biblical depictions of slavery, white southerners’ reading of scripture presupposed a natural social hierarchy in which Christianity, whiteness, and masculinity stood at the top.” The black smears of paint on my face and hands were smelly, and they itched. It was the mid-1980s, and I was seven, maybe, or »
Memoir
We cannot understand the power and the meaning of food until we understand hunger. Hunger at its most basic is the lack of food, and therefore a body’s need and craving for food. If we are very lucky in this world, we feel hunger as a minor physical discomfort that can be readily sated: a »
Essay
At elegant gatherings and august meetings, I often scan the room and wonder aloud why I am, as people like myself are often given to ask, the Only Negro in the Room, or ONR, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Natasha Trethewey have been known to note. Surely black intellectuals are central to these types of inquiries, »
Essay
“I just want to let you know,” the older white man told me at a late-summer fish fry, “that my family owned slaves, and those slaves were happy.” This was mid-September of 2014, my second year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The event was held at »
Essay
My great-grandfather was murdered by a white man in 1926, the night before New Year’s Eve. He was thirty-five years old—my grandmother Sara’s father. I call her Nana Boo. She doesn’t have any memories of him because he was killed when she was a baby. His wife, Nana Boo’s mama, Mary Jones Barkley, was the »
Essay
For almost thirty years, my parents ran an antique shop in an old two-story house in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. When I was little, stuff arrived and departed by way of my mother’s van, a matte-green 1970s camper, stripped of its bunk and golden burlap curtains. It had no air conditioning and smelled of cigarettes »
Memoir
After the eighth chicken and dumpling bowl was stacked back in the cupboard and the rest of our extended family had departed for home or a nap, Mema and I took long walks on Sunday afternoons through endless pine and oak in the backcountry of southeastern North Carolina. Out of my Sunday dress and into »
Memoir
Pearl, I’m sorry. I’m not feeling it anymore. I tried. For years, I tried. You know I did. I served on the board of your Birthplace in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. I read the biographies. I wrote grants and hired volunteers and emailed leaders across the state and researched themed tours for your museum. I »
Memoir
“I am in Jamaica because Frank wanted his ashes scattered here; he wanted to come home.” I have been in Jamaica for four days and cannot find a place that makes ox-tail stew. I ask one of my aunts, but she says that it’s not something you typically find on a restaurant menu. She’s not »