Sublime

Before I was a real academic, I was a black woman and before I was a black woman I was a black girl. I was a certain kind of black girl. I am the only child of an only child who was the child of a woman whose grandparents had been touched by slavery. We are southern, almost pedestrianly so. We are the people who went north to Harlem but not west to

our district the renouncers-of-the-state were assumed the good guys, the heroes, the men of honour, the dauntless, legendary warriors, outnumbered,

It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy; it’s that they make it look fast.

My careful rendering of ‘I don’t know’, combined with a terminal face – nothing in it, nothing behind it, a well-turned-out nothing – I thought would bemuse the gossips, confound them, run counter to their expectations, so that eventually, frustrated, wearied, they’d call a halt to their persecutions,

that Milkman’s name really was Milkman.