Black people shouting because there is no other way for them to hold what they know. There is no other mode of expression for understanding all of the things that have held people back from understanding freedom, and there is no other volume at which one can say to their people, I want all of us to be free, and I cannot do it alone.

My loves, I want to know if heaven is real only if you are promised to be in it. I do not fear death as much as I fear the uncertain dark. An eternity that doesn’t include a chance for me to make amends for all of the things that kept me from holding you close while you were breathing and telling you how much I didn’t understand about love. I know

I do love carrying the Good and Holy Name of a man who might have looked like any man. I can better explain all of the ways I have disappeared. I thought I was in love enough to stay, but then the sky opened up and I became a kaleidoscope of butterflies. I thought I might live a life in which I let no one down, but that was the other man who is not

Black people get asked to perform hope when white people are afraid, but it doesn’t always serve reality. Hope is the small hole cut into the honest machinery. The milk crate is still a milk crate, but with the right opening, a basketball can make its way through. If I am going to be afraid, I might as well do it honest. Arm in arm with everyone I

When your mark is your own, defined by rules of your own making, you build the boat wide enough for your people and whatever you need to survive. You save yourself first.

For as long as there is a future, there will be Black people in it, hopefully surviving in even newer and better ways than we are now. Circles of light opening their wide arms to briefly take our bodies somewhere higher. It will appear spectacular to everyone who isn’t us.

I give thanks, then, for the worlds beyond this world that Octavia Butler wrote. And for how, even in those worlds, there is a suffering like the suffering I understood. That even in space, or in futuristic landscapes, there are still codes to be switched. Still suffering that grows inside a person until it becomes armor. I give thanks for Octavia

Afrofuturism exists as a genre because the white American imagination rarely thought to insert Black people into futuristic settings, even when those settings are rooted in the past, like Star Wars. Octavia Butler wrote science fiction that included aliens with dreadlocks. Nalo Hopkinson writes of a dystopian future in which Black people are trying

I think when you are young enough and impressionable enough, and you maybe don’t know much about what rests beyond the stars, you imagine anyone can just go. Including yourself, or including a music group of Black women who wore the costume well. Including a person you love, who sang along to songs by a member of that group from time to time and su