Essay
“I remain haunted by what I can never know or speak of.” Growing up in the sandhills of Nebraska, I remember how my displaced Chickasaw father always surrounded us with his southern sensibilities: fried green tomatoes and eggplants, okra, black-eyed peas to start the new year, corn bread, and pit-roasted pig, javelina boar, or other »
Essay
“This was genealogy as survival, genealogy with land and livelihood on the line.” As a child in the 1980s, I sensed that family history was deadly serious. Family history was material, physical, and psychological survival. In New Jersey, where I grew up, our family was Black; back in Oklahoma, my grandmother reminded us, we were »
Memoir
“my lament begins / where the bodies are buried / beside each other . . . ” 1. Achiel Knock, knock.Who’s there? Mano en ng’a?Ai yawa, it’s me. Anyalo donjo?Me who?Me who hates meandering introductions.
Essay
I grew up in a house full of books, three of which belonged to my dad. They were his wellworn Bible; How I Made a Million Dollars in Mail Order, and You Can Too; and The Foxfire Book. Published in 1972, The Foxfire Book carried the reader into the mountains of North Georgia, near the »
Memoir
Windy Gap Road twists up Little Brushy Mountain, dense forest on all sides until you crest the top and feel like you’re driving right into the sky. Follow the road a short way until it crosses Cling Johnson Road, named for my great-grandfather, and at the very end, you’ll hit the Johnson homestead: a medium-sized »
Essay
The capillaries that connect your heart to your lungs are both airstreams and blood flow. Doctors call them periarterial. In the maze of small blood vessels that process oxygen no one knows where your heart ends and your lungs begin. Maybe there is no end to your heartbeat, your breathing. Even when the decade starts »
Memoir
Raised in the latter days of the mannered South, I was schooled daily, hourly—minutely—on the proper ways to speak, dress, eat, move, and sit. My parents imparted these lessons wherever we happened to be, whether at home, out in public, or at their higher-end antiques shop in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They told me what »
Memoir
“While I struggle, I will continue to study and learn about the struggles of others.” After spending almost thirty-three years in a Mississippi prison, on a hot summer day in 2020, I was contacted and invited to be a host of a radical study group. What intrigued me about this program was that it was facilitated »
Memoir
What societal interest is served by keeping prisoners illiterate? What social benefit is there in ignorance? Much has been written and much has been said about life in prison. Some write of the glaring incidents of violence that occur, certain that such subjects will grab the attention of the reader. Others play down the violence, »
Memoir
The injustices keep worsening. How can prisoners report the abuse when they have no voice? When will the hate stop? When will justice be served? Injustices at the prisons in Texas are perpetual. Correctional officers go to work bullying, assaulting, harassing, discriminating, raping, belittling, taunting, judging, and retaliating against prisoners! Treating prisoners inhumanely and subjecting »
Memoir
“I’m surrounded by many brilliant minds, any one of them fully capable of doing what I’ve done and more if given the opportunity.” The presentation at the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration (MUMI) conference in December capped a very productive 2019, which, judging by the current state of our society, can only be considered exceptional. »
Memoir
I use art to examine not only the depths of my own mind but all that surrounds me. Locked in Dark Calm symbolizes the experience of having to process anger inside of a controlled and contained environment. It also represents a turning point in my life. To be able to move forward, it is necessary »