Sublime

gumption?

I waited in the parking lot of my apartment for a white woman walking out of the complex to get in her car so I wouldn’t scare her.

I listened to the Coup and read everything James Baldwin had written that summer. I learned you haven’t read anything if you’ve only read something once or twice. Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision. I read The Fire Next Time over and over again. I wondered how it would read differently had the entire book, and not jus

I left my car at work, ran to my apartment, did some push-ups, weighed myself, ran six miles around Poughkeepsie, came back home, locked the bedroom door, did more push-ups, said prayers, got in bed, and accepted no matter how much weight I lost, small, smart white boys would always have the power to make big black boys force them into buying our l

I’d only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folks’ feelings with a generic smile and manufactured excellence they could not give one fuck about. I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white studen

Being twice as excellent as white folk will get you half of what they get. Being anything less will get you hell.”

After school, in the front seat of our Nova, you told me what white folk demanded of us was never fair, but following their rules was sometimes safer for all the black folk involved and all the black folk coming after us. You kept talking about how amazing it was that Mississippi had just elected its first progressive governor since William Winter.

You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.