Sublime

“I am not a pretty woman,” said Maud Martha. “If you married a pretty woman, you could be the father of pretty children. Envied by people. The father of beautiful children.” “But I don’t know,” said Paul. “Because my features aren’t fine. They aren’t regular. They’re heavy. They’re real Negro features. I’m light, or at least I can claim to be a

In December of 1982, the Cuban-born Luis Alvarez, a Miami police officer, shot and killed Neville Johnson Jr., a young Black Caribbean American man, in an Overtown arcade as Johnson was playing a video game. The following conflagration left eighteen dead and shut down more than two hundred businesses. There was no conviction.

“achieving a better life

The colored boys frothed and speculated and stared off in class, slacked off in the sweet potato fields. Mulling the prospect of a black champion: One of them victorious for a change, and those who kept you down whittled to dust, seeing stars.

The most painful part is this: we mix and move and cross fates and link them. We are cast down and pushed aside in so many different ways, and yet so often we cling tightly to even the most fragile benefits of being located above the darkest of whichever plantation economy into which we were born. We don’t have to do that. There are so many more of

On the former cemetery land, two years later, in 1941, the city also situated the Magnolia Housing Projects. Wherever you are in the South, the accent of “Magnolia” is heavy on the first syllable. And in Louisiana, the ubiquitous hardwood trees produce flowers that are fragrant and leaves that are shiny and thick. Called by the nickname “‘Nolia,”