The Late Arrival

School starts this week. I'm anxious, and at the same, relieved because my daughter's chosen to do a many of her classes virtually. Still, my mind chatters that all it takes is one hour, one moment, one exposure to start a potentially deadly domino fall. There's so much, mom. Like, I don't understand why we need to be face-to-face. Like, why are they forcing this to happen? I went off on a well-informed, frustrated tangent...in my head. She didn't need to hear that, and frankly I didn't need to hear myself say it. So I dug deep into what I believed and what I knew and what I felt. You know what? I'm not gonna lie: I am anxious. Thing is, I honestly believe that God is gonna do something big this school year. Like, beyond what you can even imagine. Seriously . She looked at me like I had grown a third head. No seriously. This school year, this whole situation -- everything is like we're walking into pitch black darkness. We don't know what's in fr

When I came back from our family trip to Pierce City, Missouri a few years ago, my dear friend wanted to know all the details. We met for lunch and I told her that, yes, my daughter, my husband and I stood at the graveside of my third-great grandmother who was born in 1795. That we even took pi ctures of the expansive greenspace where my second great-grandfather’s house once stood before he and his step-son had a firefight with an angry mob who torched the place with them in it. It’s quiet, pastoral and unassuming. That we stood on the land my ancestors used to own before they were driven from it. And that, yes, we held vigil with a small group from the community on the very ground where an ancestor was lynched that night in 1901. You should really write a book about this , she nudged. Maybe if I can sort it all out in my head. It’s just a lot.   I mean, I wished I had a picture taken of my daughter and I by our maternal ancestor’s grave. I can still feel the rugged rock and rough eng

Sometimes, you think you've lost something and it turns up. Such was the case with a post I wrote for another site way back in 2015 around the Michael Brown verdict. I remember the night I wrote it: the split screen of President Obama addressing the nation on one side, while the other side recorded a town on fire. I felt sick in my soul, while my husband didn't feel or understand what I was feeling, and why I was feeling. I sat there on the couch confounded, sad, demoralized, weary and angry. I poured it all out on a national platform, not caring whether my words were measured or light enough to be palatable to the white folks in my life. Months later the post was recognized with an award. We went to New York and everything to receive an award along with a lot of other amazing writers. I thought the post was lost in the takeover of that site, but 2015 me must've been thinking ahead to this day and saved it on a thumb drive way back when. Yesterday, I stumbled upon these wor

My husband posted a pic collage on social media a few days back to commemorate Loving Day. Admittedly, I was less than enthusiastic considering, uh I don’t know…EVERYTHING. Yay. Loving Day. That’s when Aunt Mag and Uncle John popped up in my memory.  I grew up seeing their portrait on the family’s upright Mason & Hamlin piano; and, in passing at least once, my mom explained: Who Woulda Thought? That's your Aunt Mag and Uncle John. People said he was an old white man, but no one ever really talked about it. I was young enough to remember that and young enough to be puzzled. IT? What was IT, and why was IT a secret? I moved on from my confusion and, I guess innocence, until about FIVE YEARS AGO when I was introduced to Loving Day , and out of nowhere, the light broke like a two-by-four splintering on my head: OMG, nobody talked about Uncle John being white because his marriage to Aunt Mag was ILLEGAL. Aunt Mag was my grandmother’s aunt. Her family – m y family – survived a triple

It was weeks ago or it ten years ago when I saw a man die. He died on Twitter. He died on Facebook. He died on the nightly news. He died on Instagram. He died again and again and again. I shook my head and sighed deeply in exhaustion. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that Botham Jean , Freddie Gray , Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor were killed? A few days ago that Ernest Lacy , Dontre Hamilton , Daniel Bell were killed?  Maybe it was just a few weeks ago and not nearly 120 years ago that my second great grandfather French, his stepson Pete and nephew Will were lynched . Days, months and years blur together while only the names have changed and the only constant is black bodies.  I file the images and the names and the stories safely away from emotion, yet close enough to vibrate into my daily reality. That reality is the one where I want to go out into the our local hinterlands to buy smoke bombs because they bring me joy; but, instead I know that law enforcement is on high alert

The test said I was pregnant. Undoubtedly. Indubitably. Pregnant. The shock of it all drove me to the vodka I brought home as a souvenir from our recent cruise, and to the precipice of stress smoking. You know, the kind of smoking where you can hear the inhale followed by a 30-second whrhhhhhhh of an exhale that obliterates an entire cigarette. But then I remembered, no that can’t be a thing because this little person inside of me will also be drinking whatever I drink and can’t even roll down a window for air when I whrhhhhhhh . That person arrived a day early. A couple days later, I wrapped her up to go home with us. All I could think was a WHOLE NEW PERSON IS COMING HOME TO LIVE WITH US FOREVER .  Then she did this: Oh precious little girl, we have NO idea what we're doing! I burst out in tears. I mean, I just wasn’t prepared and I knew it. We brought her home anyway. She was funny, smart (way smarter than me and I knew that when she was three-years-old and called

A true story. They always seem to come without warning out of the clear blue with some deep truth that's eluded me for most of my adult life. This was one of those times. I was feeling all high and mighty for encouraging my kiddo's discipline throughout the stay at home order (like that's not part of the parenting gig, but whatever). Well...what was I supposed to say? Seriously, what is it like to be a teen right now, nonetheless a teen who's busting her butt academically, much less one whose school year was shut down in the blink of an eye? But to hear her articulate MOM. I'M BLACK. THIS IS WHAT WE DO. And yes, she's white and black, but she's realized in her whole short seventeen years, she is perceived as black, so she embraces it. But still... THIS IS WHAT WE DO. I've always taken the THIS IS WHAT WE DO as a given. She's well aware of my family being at the center of a triple lynching and then starting a new life here in M

Fresh bread, still warm from the oven, freshly fried chicken and perhaps a cooled peach cobbler went into the picnic basket, gently and carefully covered with a red and white checkered cloth. Kids were packed up and toted down to the battlefield for the day's festivities. After all, it wasn't a Civil War back in the early days, it was just a skirmish that'd be over in a few months. The "skirmish" would end up ricocheting States' Rights from one century into the next. Its fruit would blossom into today's racial disparities ranging from prison populations, to history curricula, to economic and housing disparities and... . ..health disparities. (see Covid-19 )   Zoom Meetings weren't a thing back then, so... . I'm a history buff, and in my early fangirling days of Civil War history and all things Lincoln, I remember thinking about families packing up picnic baskets to watch skirmishes as if they were tennis matches and marveling ho

Almost every tchotchke in my house has a story. Here is one of those tchotckes and this is its story. We were out shopping in a pseudo-fancy store selecting fancy cheeses, meats, crackers and fruit for a New Year's charcuterie board. I grabbed some kind of goat cheese in the round and clumsily bumped the one next to it. It rolled and rolled. I laughed and a told my daughter to catch it before it got too far away, even as a another customer nearly crossed its path. I kept laughing as my eyes met with his. His gaze had an icy, somber and hostile demeanor that told me I, nor my daughter didn't belong at the pseudo-fancy discount store. I steeled myself and kept laughing almost out of spite as much as I laughed at the site of my kid racing the cheese wheel. She caught it and returned it to its place. That was 2016. A little over a month after the election. My daughter knew something was off, so realizing she'd follow my lead, I suppressed my eye-roll and shrugged

So I usually fall asleep by one or two o’clock, and then I wake up around three-thirty. My then-therapist nods his head and lets out an Ohhhhh…mmmmm. Then, I stay awake long enough to see the sun rise and then drift off for what feels like ten minutes maybe, and then wake up groggy. It's a beautiful thing when you actually want to see it. Ohhhh…mmmm. *blank stare from me* You’ve got EMA’s. At last, a diagnosis. Wait. What are EMA's? Am I dying? I knew I was dying. *heavy sigh from the therapist* EMA's are Early Morning Awakenings. Well, no %$@&$! Sherlock! Look, I’ve never been a good sleeper, unlike my husband who can literally say goodn—and be snoring before his head hits the pillow. It’s some weirdo parlor trick that we probably oughta take on the road. Even now, it takes at least a week for me to fall asleep and then the dreaded EMAs hit. I was in my late-twenties at the time of my thirty-dollar-copay EMA “diagnosis.”