Episodes
When a Colored Girl Speaks
Southern-born between the ellipses of segregation and desegregation, I journeyed colored, black, and white Americas, ultimately landing as an Ivy League-trained university professor burdened with racial silences of my own. It was a near hypertensive crisis that led me to gather up who I was and what I have become to reclaim the colored girl within.
Going Home to Where I Been
I revisit what was, but I do not long for an American past or seek the romanticisms of a segregated ethnic enclave. I go home to places where I been for the same reasons all those people left my Aunt Fannie to be guardian of so many memories—to know I am, and we were.
The Rich Davises
A generation beyond enslavement and into the twentieth century, my family sought freedom’s promise, something more than the American Dream. Gathered are fragments of stories told on the way of saying something else---stories of nation, family, and the tenaciousness of will.
I am of Her
My mother was not afraid of anything, and by that, I mean she did not fear the powerful. In the wake of the killing of four little girls like me, she pushed the color line with me in tow. I was to be on the frontlines of a movement, and so were all the other Negro children of my generation in the South who were called to do something that had not yet been done, something the nation still was not yet quite ready to do.
May Day Queen
I was queen of the festivities and, like so many things in the colored world in which I was raised it was celebrated with great pomp and circumstance. As a kindergartener, I did not racially mark this moment because whiteness was immaterial to me, but this would not be so for long as more history was to be made.
The Boots Were Made for Walking
I first laid claim to social protest on a walk from the “white” elementary school, as we still called it. I encountered two white boys with BB rifles aimed at my head; they fired, and I refused to run. All these years later, I wonder what it will take to walk the last mile of the way.
The Shadow of Suns
My elders had seen everything there was to fear, and they knew that the power that resided in man was not the power of God. Because of them, I know what wisdom means and the gentleness of humility, and I know what only a communion with the dead can tell.
Me, MLK, and the Quietness of Death
On Easter vacation in April 1968, I stood with my mother at Martin Luther King’s graveside, in quiet peace, recalling the anger, horror, and dark teary shine of a people bereaved. No longer did the most horrid things exist only in fairytales; it was the land of the living that now frightened me.
The Yellow Sentinels
White children finally arrived at my neighborhood Negro elementary school eighteen years after Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education (1954) brought an end to school segregation with all deliberate speed. New books and fresh paint, traffic lights, and a pedestrian crosswalk arrived with them. Silver posts arose too with square yellow heads: crossing lights, like sentinels to be the guardian of white children.
God Chooses Only the Best
“Blood done signed all our names,” my daddy said. My thoughts turn to my sixteen-year old cousin’s 1974 murder in sight of her high school, where, five years earlier, black girls would never have been, of how her death was publicly marked, and of the alchemy of emotions I felt as connected to what was then—and to all that was unsaid.
Moonlight in Liberty
I came of age in the years after what historian C. Vann Woodward called the Second Reconstruction. I would enjoy its fruits, and there would not be the Nadir that followed the first Reconstruction, but there was a mitigated darkness. I slid in and out of the colored-negro-black world in which I was raised, travelling between the Ivy League and my homeplace, but it was being overtaken by something that was not us.
A Circle on the Verge of Closing
In his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama evoked the American history of the civil rights struggle as a sojourn made in increments and bold strokes, and that sojourn is the history of my family and so many others whose American story began in this land as indentured servants and as human chattel. In the lifetime of futures, they knew this day, too, would come
Epilogue. The Ruins of Memory
My student searched my face as if my own blackness held what was lost to him. It would take a lifetime of stories, and even this would not be enough, but still it is those fragments of memory that hold us one to another—and these are mine, and I give them, for us.