Memoir
For the last couple years of her life, until she died at the age of ninety-six, my grandmother Lala saw and heard ghosts. (You may have a Nana or a Meemaw; my brother and cousins and I had a Lala.) Many of those who’ve spent time with people nearing death are familiar with this phenomenon. »
Memoir
Last December, as I was wrapping up a visit to my family in eastern North Carolina (the last such visit I’d be able to make, it turned out, for quite a while), my mom gave me a brown spiral-bound handbook: Presbyterian Pot Pourri, a cookbook published in 1984 by the women of the First Presbyterian »
Memoir
I. I have carried a photograph on my person for the past year now. Like my debit card, lip balm, or driver’s license, this photograph has become part of my daily essentials kit. In the black-and-white image, two women clad in patterned and madras print dresses and low kitten heels sit on a rock and »
Essay
The clay knows the hand.The land knows the feet.The souls know the land. Salt water flows in my veins, and I can recall my first taste of the Atlantic Ocean at two years old. I grew up hearing stories of how a six-year-old boy and girl, my maternal grandparents, met on a sandy South Carolina »
Memoir
“’Lisa, Keep on being a rock star!’ my friend Emily wrote. ‘You’ve proven to the universe that you are not to be messed with. Now you can do anything you want.’ Anything—except, apparently, remember.” The earliest thing I remember after the hemorrhage is a moment that I can’t place in time and that may not »
Film
“I have skin in the game. I live here. Appalachians hold me accountable at the grocery store, and that makes the work, and me, more honest.” The week of March 13, 2017, was like any other week for me. I was hustling to get access to a tense courtroom for my feature documentary Recovery Boys »
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, »