I’m built like a mullet. Business in the front, party in the back. What is it about an awkward ten-or-eleven-year-old that screams, “please call attention to my body?” That was the time when my body started developing; my family fretted that I might be swaybacked and admonished me to stand up straight. At dances, the [...]
My grandmother’s mother, Mary Salter, is a mysterious fruit on our family tree, not quite shaded in. We know very little about her; she died around 1930, leaving two little girls under four who would torture themselves, for the rest of their lives, trying to remember her face. Family lore suggests that Mary was a [...]
I’m walking into the kitchen at my grandfather’s house, and my uncle Charles is there, watching TV on the little color set on the tiled counter. He’s watching the new Ken Burns documentary, and I’m preparing to slowly edge out of the room, because The Civil War (Parts 1-199) nearly robbed me of my will [...]
Once, I spent my weekends in a tiny, cramped, cluttered apartment in Cal’s married student housing. A certain Phd student in rhetoric, Mark — who, implausibly, had custody of three little girls from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon — made a point of opening our My-Little-Pony-addled minds to culture. On Saturday morning, we’d wake to [...]
It was unseasonably hot. That must have been the reason my grandmother walked down the aging basement stairs and out of the open garage door and traveled a block to the corner store, holding my three-year-old hand in hers. The giddy excitement of the moment still stays with me; the black night sky, like a [...]
This is how to make collard greens. First, my grandfather drives his truck to the Alemany Farmer’s Market. My grandfather chooses a bunch of taut, bitter leaves, and he puts money in the dirt-caked, stubby-fingered hand of the farmer who planted the seeds, and he brings home the collards to my grandmother to cook. But [...]
I was one of the first generations to grow up with rap music. When I was a child (in the good old days of Reaganomics) rap fell into two categories: message rap (Public Enemy) and party rap (Run D.M.C.). Message rap discussed politics and institutional racism and other important things. (Sometimes, but not always, Flavor [...]
(Untitled Fantasy Novel is winning, though it’s a close thing. The dirty dishes are the real loser here.) I’m at 22,241 words of a novel I never thought I could write. I am behind the NanoWriMo curve (I should probably be around 26,600 words by now) but I’m assuming it will all work itself out. [...]
I’m the girl with the hair. I’ve always been the girl with the hair. It’s always out of the ordinary: thick, puffy, definitely nappy, and, strangely enough, really long. My hair is my calling card, my icebreaker, whether it is cornrowed, natural, wet, pulled back in a bun, relaxed, or pressed within an inch of [...]
It was fun watching people take out their frustrations on each other this week. Just kidding, it was harrowing and depressing. Last Week: Don and Betty were a hot, sexytime couple for basically the first time ever, jet-setting in a vision of Rome that was very like the backdrop of a James Bond flick. Pete [...]
