The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Or do such Sisyphean philosophies—that “the road is life”—turn out to be bourgeois luxuries indulged by those safe enough to pretend this is all there is? Does the hunger and hope of the migrant show us something more fundamentally human? Maybe our craving for rest, refuge, arrival, home is a hunger that can’t be edited—the heart an obstinate palim
... See moreJames K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always – the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human bei
... See moreColson Whitehead • The Underground Railroad: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017
We haven’t outrun or outlived the plantation, although it looks a little bit different. Now the fugitives are from Central America, and the unfree laborers are in prison. Some kids are still hungry, even so many years after the breakfast programs and Head Start and all of the gains fought for by Black elected officials, because the gag is in the mo
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
My mother bought me a book when I was twelve years old by Virginia Hamilton, called The People Could Fly, and it told the story of Ibo Landing on St. Simons Island, a place I’d first see as a teenager. In the fictionalized version I read, the Ibo people, brought there on a slave ship, witnessed the brutality of a slave plantation and turned around
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