Sitting on the concrete steps in the back of my grandma’s house, our dad shows us how to burn paper with a magnifying glass. Says people kill ants this way, how cruel it is. It was true: the magnifying glass...
We are survivors: we the descendants of the Africans who endured the wretched march to the west coast of their continent, brutal confinement, and cruel transatlantic passage, to reach alive—somehow alive—the shores of a new world.
Dad, you look like a doll I wouldn’t want to play with, boxed in your casket. The mortician tried to paint you pretty. I wanted to be pretty, too, but mom says makeup is inappropriate for funerals.
Two women share a hospital room, separated by a green-blue curtain, at the end of a brief, beige hallway. Their prospects foreclosed by illness, the women have agreed to enter this room, if not to share it, and to find what peace is...
Is Mount Everest the tallest mountain on Earth? It would certainly seem to qualify. Chinese geographers tell us that it measures 29,017 feet, while Nepali geographers make it a skosh short of 29,029 feet. The National Geographic Society...
