Mosaic 36 by Mosaic Literary Magazine

JABARI ASIM

BLACK LIVES MATTER

NATHAN MCCALL

L I T E R A R Y

THE BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS

M A G A Z I N E

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“LAWS OF WRATH IS ALL THRILLER, NO FILLER—A WHITE-KNUCKLED TREAT.” – JAMES PATTERSON “A GRITTY CRIME THRILLER, SPIRITUAL QUEST,AND LOVE STORY ALL WOVEN INTO ONE COMPELLING TALE.” – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY [Laws of Depravity]

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content Interviews Nathan McCall by La Juana Green ............................................................... 8 Jabari Asim by G'Ra Asim ............................................................................ 24 Reviews Only the Strong: An American Novel by Jabari Asim ................................... 14 It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time by Angela Jackson .................................. 15 Trouble Sleeping by Abdul Ali ..................................................................... 18 Lighting the Shadow by Rachel Eliza Griffiths .............................................. 20 A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James ........................................ 21 Excerpt Only the Strong by Jabari Asim ................................................................... 30 Mosaic Lesson Plans ......................................................................................... 36 #BlackLivesMatter by Eisa Nefertari Ulen Lesson plan for high-school educators Mosaicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lesson plans give high-school educators ways to connect literature to history and social issues. Around Town by photographer Marcia E. Wilson .............................................. 48

Cover image: AP Photo/Matt Rourke

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Everything Job Ogbonnaya knew about sex he learned from American pornography.â&#x20AC;?

a debut novel by Julie Iromuanya $16.95 spring 2015 trade paperback 978-1-56689-397-8 coffeehousepress.org

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contributors G'Ra Asim attends Columbia University persuing an MFA in nonfiction writing. Julia Brown is a Richmond, Virginia native. A Kimbilio Fellow, she recently earned her MFA from the University of Houston, where she won the Inprint Robert J. Sussman Prize for Fiction. She is working on her first collection of short stories. Sidik Fofana received an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. He lives and teaches in Brooklyn. La Juana Green is a native of Washington D. C. She holds a B. A. degree in English Literature with a minor in education. She is a graduate of the University of the District of Columbia. Her screenplay Through the Looking Glass won an Honorable Mention and her other screenplay titled Roe was a finalist in the Fresh Pitch Contest. She has just completed a television pilot titled Unjust Justice. Ciara Miller, a native of Chicago, holds both an MFA and MA in Poetry and African American/African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University. She also received her BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. She has served as the cohost and co-coordinator of Bloomington, Indiana’s poetry slam series for three consecutive years. She is the co-founder of Chicago Artists Against Gun Violence which is a collective of artists who connect youth mainly from the west and south side of Chicago to housing, job, and youth organization opportunities to improve upon their conditions. She has published poems and academic essays in such collections and periodicals as Break Beat Poets, Fjords Review, African American Review, Callaloo, Muzzle, Toegood Poetry, Alice Walker: Critical Insights, PLUCK, Chorus, and Blackberry Magazine.

Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (2008), Black Peculiar (2011) and Fearful Beloved (2015). Individual poems appear or are forthcoming in Fence, jubilat, Tin House, Memoir, The Volta Book of Poets, Women Write Resistance and widely elsewhere. She won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Performance Writing in 2014. Rochelle Spencer is co-editor, along with Jina Ortiz, of All About Skin: An Anthology of Award-Winning Fiction by Women Writers of Color. A co-founder of the Harlem Works Collective, she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning. She has contributed to numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Ms., Health, Heart & Soul, Vibe, Black Issues Book Review, Quarterly Black Review of Books, and CreativeNonfiction.org. Ulen graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. A founding member of Ringshout: A Place for Black Literature, she teaches English at Hunter College in New York City. www.EisaUlen. com. Born in London, England; Marcia Wilson’s photography has documented many writers of the African Diaspora. Her photos have appeared in Vibe, Publishers Weekly, Black Issues Book Review, LA Weekly, and QBR. She has exhibited at The National Black Writers Conference, Medgar Evers College, New Haven Public Library, New York Public Library (Flatbush branch), and Air Gallery. She currently resides in Brooklyn. Visit www.WideVisionPhotography.com for additional information.

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Almost Grown New from Tony Lindsay Almost Grown is a collection of •fteen short stories with teen and young adult main characters. These young characters live ordinary day-today lives with unexpected twists, and there are no “super” adults saving them; they must work through some of the pit falls and problems of growing up. The reader journeys through bad decisions made better, and young people realizing that it is ok not to be right, or the best all the time. Being almost grown is dif•cult, but these stories show the pleasure of that stage of life as well.

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Editor & Publisher Ron Kavanaugh ron@mosaicmagazine.org Mosaic Literary Magazine (ISSN 1531-0388) is published by the Literary Freedom Project. Content copyright ÂŠ 2015. No portion of this magazine can be reprinted or reproduced in any form without prior permission from the publisher. Retail Distribution Publisherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Distribution Group info@pdgmags.com Subscribe online: MosaicMagazine.org 3 Issues: $16.00 Institution Subscriptions EBSCO 1.205.991.6600 WT Cox 1.800.571.9554 Contact the editor We welcome comments. Send e-mails to info@mosaicmagazine.org Visit MosaicMagazine.org for submission guidelines. Colophon Layout Software: Adobe InDesign CS5 Graphic Software: Paint Shop Pro 12 Mast Typeface: Whomp Editorial Typeface: Zapf Humanist Mosaic is made possible with the support of members and subscribers. POSTMASTER Please send address corrections to: Mosaic 314 W. 231 St #470 Bronx, NY 10463

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Nathan Twenty McCall Years After by La Juana Green

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My introduction to the work of Nathan McCall came in the early 90s while I was a working with the NYC Department of Juvenile Justice. I was teaching English to some of New York’s toughest and most dangerous kids whose crimes ranged from rape to murder. Their troubled adolescence was only equaled by their backgrounds of nominal interest in school and education. The challenge I faced was to find an access point to engage this young cohort. A colleague recommended Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall. I read the book, immediately introduced it to my class, and quickly built a lesson plan around it. It was very successful, particularly, since I taught young African-American males. The kids became actively engaged in McCall’s autobiography of a young black man’s coming of age in Portsmouth, Virginia. They shared his pain of racism, incarceration and other struggles that young African-

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American males face. McCall is a master at storytelling. I met him in New York while he was promoting his book in 1994, and later tried to reach him with the possibility of him speaking to my class. Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, had been a previous guest in the facility. Unfortunately, we were not able to make the class visit happen. Placed against the current backdrops of unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson, Makes Me Wanna Holler is as thought provoking and insightful as the day it was written. It elucidates the journey of a young black man’s ability to overcome incarceration through mentoring. The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Nathan McCall is currently a senior lecturer in the African-American Studies Department at Emory University in Atlanta. La Juana Green: It has been over twenty years since you wrote Makes You Wanna Holler. Do you think things have changed for African-American men? Nathan McCall: Clearly not. If we take a look at police shootings in America, not much has changed with regards to how Black men are treated in this society. It’s clear we are regarded as a target. It infuriates me. The issue that is most prevalent in the so-called millennium is that shooting of Black men has replaced hanging. In measuring the progress nothing much has changed and the push for public concerns is needed. Some people are upset that we are concerned, as if Black life doesn’t matter. The issues that we are faced with are poverty,

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income gaps, health, and education. It’s like we are frozen in time. LG: Are you familiar with the memoir by Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets? NM: Yes, I read the book and loved it. LG: Do you see any parallel between your life as an African-American male and he being a Latino male? NM: Yes. A very interesting parallel regarding the way we both grew up, perceiving that our lives and options in this world were very limited. Perception is powerful. Our perception impacted some of the bad choices we made as teenagers growing up. Our perception about America was not inaccurate. LG: The title Makes Me Wanna Holler was taken from the Marvin Gaye song “Inner City Blues." Why was this title chosen? NM: “Makes Me Wanna Holler,” that song was one of the most powerful commentaries on America. It came out when I was a teenager, so when I was working on the autobiography I would listen to jar my memory. Music helps to stimulate the memory. When I was working on the book I used music from a different time period to stimulate my memory. It was recorded in the seventies and I wrote about it in the nineties and it is still the same. LG: In certain cultures young boys have rites of passage. Aborigines remove a tooth and cut off part of a finger. Is there a rite of passage for young African-American boys today, and if not should there be? NM: Clearly, there are some informal rites of passage.

The problem is they are not healthy. The rites of passages that are in place are guided by adults to make young people make their transition into manhood. Jews have bar mitzvahs, which is a very important rite of passage. Without those formal mechanisms young people will develop their own. Young Black males will define what manhood is. When I was coming up, we had to know how to fight and how to deal with girls. There was no formal mechanism in place so we developed some very distorted notions about relationships. Relationships were about conquest, not intimacy and clearly incarceration is a rite of passage for young Black men today. I'd see an older guy in the neighborhood who had just gotten out of prison and I looked at him with admiration. I too, had a distorted thinking by the time I got to prison. I expected to pass through that way. LG: In the chapter titled, “Trains,” you and your buddies measured the Black woman’s beauty by her skin color. Do you feel that this is still an issue with Black men? NM: We called it color struck. I have friends who were color struck. Color has never been an issue with me. I can’t identify a pattern in my choice of women. I teach a course on Black images in the media, and we deal with light skinned versus dark skinned. I can’t recall who said it but it was said that “hurt people, hurt people.” People who are damaged are more likely to hurt people. Dark-skinned women clearly get victimized by men who don’t think they are attractive. Light-skinned women get victimized by the dark skinned women who resent that light-skinned women are held up on a pedestal. I still have friends that are into the brown bag consciousness. LG: Also in the same chapter you say, “Using a member

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of the most vulnerable groups of human beings on the face of the earth—Black females.” Why do you think Black females are so vulnerable, particularly to men of their own race? NM: Black people in general are subjected to oppression; then women are subjected to oppression. Black women are subjected to oppression times two. There is a huge burden that falls on Black women’s shoulders; they carry the burden and quite often don’t get credit for it. LG: In your chapter titled “Respect,” men of your generation would use their hands to get and demand respect if they felt they had been disrespected. Are AfricanAmerican men still fighting for respect? What are the consequences for disrespect today on the streets? NM: Yes, a distorted sense of manhood is still the same with video images. You can see young brothers are following some of the rules of the street. It is unfortunate. The result is a lot of wasted potential. We used guns too, I carried a gun from the time I was a sophomore until I graduated. They use guns to get respect, but these guns are more powerful than the ones we had. LG: Do you think young African-American men are angry? NM: Yeah, they are angry. Understand, they are angry because they are functioning in a system that is stacked against us. This is America, the rhetoric of America doesn’t match the realty and where Black men are concerned, it never has. LG: Do you have children? NM: Yes, I have two sons and a daughter.

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LG: How have you prepared your sons for the racism that exists against Black males? NM: Just by talking to them about what is. Not in a formal way but as I see it, and as they experience it. LG: Are there solutions? NM: That is a monumental question, because it is a monumental issue. We can’t afford to keep waiting for white society to change it, it would be nice, but in the mean time we need to focus on what we can do to uplift ourselves. For example, voting doesn’t cost anything. If we were to show up in big numbers we could turn the political system on its head just by voting. ★

Subscribe Today Mosaic is a print tri-annual (Spring, Summer & Fall/Winter) that explores the literary arts by writers of African descent, and features interviews, essays, and book reviews. Three issues: $16 www.mosl.it/3mags

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reviews

Only the Strong: An American Novel by Jabari Asim Agate Bolden Reviewed by Julia Brown In his debut novel Only the Strong, Jabari Asim has captured something plaintive and essential in his generous rendering of 1970s Gateway City, a fictional AfricanAmerican Midwestern town still reeling from the devastation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. On its cover, Only the Strong declares itself “An American Novel;” in Asim’s pages, readers will recall the work of Ann Petrie, Stuart Dybek, John Edgar Wideman, and Sherwood Anderson—writers who have created nuanced portraits of vivacious American communities. Only the Strong comprises a trio of intertwining narratives, woven deftly together to form a sprawling tableau that is as entertaining as it is ambitious. The protagonist of the novel’s first storyline is Lorenzo “Guts” Tolliver, a retired professional hitman struggling to distance himself from his violent past. A call from his former boss, Ananias Goode, plunges him back into a world of flamboyant, irrepressible sports figures, barbershop meet-ups, shady enforcer-types, and a mysterious death. Guts longs for a quieter, more secure existence, but as he reestablishes his connection with the Gateway City’s dark side, his old habits kick in, threatening his relationship with his girlfriend Pearl and jeopardizing his chance at stability. Guts, fenced in by his history and reputation, attempts the difficult work of reimagining his life. The novel’s second storyline concerns Ananias Goode,

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long-time king of the local underworld, as he tries to become a legitimate businessman. Goode, a married man, is under the sway of both the changing times and his illicit affair with Artinces Noel, Gateway City’s intelligent, devoted pediatrician—a woman who has her own secrets. The third storyline involves the foster child taken in and mentored by Dr. Noel, Charlotte Divine, who goes off to college and begins a chaotic romance with a charismatic, troubled student. Charlotte comes of age traversing difficult emotional territory amidst an atmosphere of campus unrest and burgeoning black pride. Across these storylines, repeated themes emerge: the conflict between the public and the private self, heartbreaking parental loss, turbulent grappling with desire and vulnerability. Early on in the novel, Jerome “Crusher” Boudreau declares to Guts Tolliver, “We all got to do shit that we don’t want to do. Got to squeeze the quiet moments in where we can.” This sentiment resonates throughout the novel as the protagonists yearn for their own “quiet moments,” navigating their particular predicaments, coping under the scrutiny of a watchful (sometimes too watchful) community. The most pressing dilemmas are internal ones: Where will their appetites lead them? How much happiness will they allow themselves? Only the Strong is historical yet surprisingly contemporary in feel, written in an unadorned, direct prose style. Readers were first introduced to Gateway City (a fictional reinvention of the author’s native St. Louis) in Asim’s acclaimed story collection, A Taste of Honey (2010); many of the characters and locales from that story collection

return in Only the Strong. The setting is drawn with a dense vibrancy that invokes nostalgia for a kind of collective life that has all but vanished from contemporary American cities. United by more than the streets of their neighborhood, Gateway City’s lively personalities experience moments of humor, joy, and friendship, even as the world they know is disappearing. If the novel suffers at all, it’s from a slight unevenness of tone: Only the Strong oscillates, sometimes uneasily, between crime novel and character study. Each protagonist is complex and compelling enough to inhabit a novel entirely of his or her own—there is a layer of individual character depth that the speed of the pacing doesn’t quite allow Asim to achieve. The novel, however, does not move exclusively via the force of individual character—far more important are the varying, enduring relationships between the characters, and their allegiance to city in which they live. Only the Strong is an engaging read. In its final pages it reminds us that, even as we exist in our own individual separate worlds, we are all connected.

It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time by Angela Jackson Northwestern University Press Reviewed by Ciara Miller Angela Jackson’s sixth collection of poetry, It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time, covers a span of American history inclusive of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Great Migration, and 21st-century Blackness. Her narrative approach is nonlinear. Jackson blurs the lines between pre-American slavery, her own experiences as a young girl and woman, and her matrilineage. She offers a jagged conception of both lines and time, challenging what readers would conventionally understand as history. The book is divided into eight sections that commence with quotes from historical Black poets from the United States and of the diaspora such as Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden, and activists such as Nancy Morejon and Ida B. Wells. This collection pays tribute to Black-American history even down to its title, which borrows from Barbara Lewis’s hit single “Hello Stranger” released in 1963. Jackson’s writings also wrestle with the meaning of Christianity in a country that has bolstered itself as “the land of the free” but which has promised little recompense to its Black citizens who were former slaves. At the center of her poems is the speaker, who begins the book as a young, rebellious girl and ends the book with concerns regarding her own mortality and her ability to see more generations of young women in her family. Jackson’s poems are imaginative, direct, and mystical. Her narrative voice is one of specificity; she focuses on fractions of a moment instead of an entire memory

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which strengthens her ability sketch a scene with greater detail. The author’s opening poem “Mississippi Summer” recounts the speaker’s experience revisiting Mississippi during a stage of puberty in which she gained her period. Many of the lines of the poem bleed into each other visually as well as contextually. The poem is compact and lacks punctuation. Every line starts with a capital letter, insinuating a new idea or discovery. The poem captures the speaker’s relationship to both mother and father and addresses the lines, generationally, that allow for her elders to see her as their new hope “whether they wanted to or not." The speaker runs wild through fields. She “walked in sandals until her feet were dirty” unlike the older women who “slept with bibles but could not read them." The speaker describes herself as an untraditional child, more enthused by nature and running away from what would define her womanhood. The older generations want more for their own lives but during a time in which segregation was more intense and economic opportunities were scarce, they could only hope that their dreams would be lived through the speaker. Her opening poem captures the essence of the collection which can largely be viewed as a coming of age or coming of citizen book as well as a coming back to home poetry collective, whether that be the American south or West Africa, pre-American slavery. Jackson is both an objective and illusory wordsmith. In her poem “Perfect Pears” she writes of her father:

Later, what an imperfect king prone to temper, he whipped us into lineage tolerating nothing he deemed outside the rule of his kingdom. “Whipped us into lineage” is often heard as “whipped us into line” but lineage carries a meaning associated with family history, or in this context, slavery given the recollection of whippings. Jackson is subvert and clever, making her unexpected word choices add new layers of meaning to her writing. Similarly, she experiments with language in her poem “Mama in Blue, White, and Love” in which the term Blue takes on various meanings—from the musical genre Blues to sadness, to blueprints. She also discusses White people and the white backdrop of American living by which her mother carved a future for herself. This poem is a tender ode to her mother which inscribes herself as a musical poet, deeply influenced by the Blues. In the earlier half of this poem, she writes: Was this in your blue print? That I be tempted by blue devils to cry instead of laugh thunderously? Is this the song (not blues) you planned for me? When did you map it out meticulously in the midnight house in a country of white as dead bones. Jackson attaches racial meanings onto the colored terms but later moves toward viewing the colors in relation to objects and emotions. The terms blue and white are redefined and twisted on their heads throughout the

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poem: Was I in your blue print: a blues note amid blue racers weaving? Is it once in a blue moon I kiss your blue collar and pin your blue ribbon in your gray-white hair? In the latter half of the poem, white is not only a term affiliated with a race but also a term associated with the mother getting older. The entire poem reads as a labor of love the speaker has for the mother and for the sacrifices her mother made to provide the speaker with a better life. The author showcases her prowess as a story teller in her poem “My Father’s Prayers.” Her attention to detail allows the reader to see her father’s sternness to his family and his vulnerability to God. This poem showcases the submission of the mother and daughter to the speaker’s father. They go into the basement to provide light and heat to their father who plays the piano—a relationship with her father that echoes one of servility: “We lurked around his doorway like cowardly debtors observing his rich rite of passage into the working day.” In a previous poem in the collection “Perfect Pears” she describes herself and her sister as “arrogant beggars who accepted his food, his shelter, and conspired against him in whispers.” Here, there is a sharp wedge between the speaker and her father. The blood line is blurred and she perceives herself to be a strain on her father or a responsibility that boosts his own pride or ego. The father is even

described as “uncharted territory” in the poem “Territory” which further emphasizes the speaker’s distance from him. In Jackson’s poem “Hope,” she exhibits a cryptic approach to capturing time. She imagines her cousin, who died on railroad tracks, as dreaming of an escape after his engine dies right before the crash. Her ability to base a poem on a small section of time—the time immediately before his death, highlights her finesse with description. However, this isn’t the only moment within the collection that Jackson experiments with time. In her seventh section, which begins with the epigraph “I still smell the foam of the sea they made me cross” by Nancy Morejon a Cuban poet and essayist, Jackson explores the place between freedom and slavery. In her poem “The Last Door” she describes the tip of West Africa as a goree, a door by which Africans went through and entered slavery. She dedicates this poem to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, thus complicating the narrative. The door then becomes a move toward survival, out of the flood, into a different state of slavery in which the residents of the city are shackled by the injustices and the lack of attention given to their immediate needs. Her poem for Phillis, presumably Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American woman poet, recaptures the speaker’s battle with Christianity. Phillis Wheatley wrote many poems about the power of Christianity as well as submissiveness to men. Jackson questions what it means to be considered the first Black poet when the language allowed to the former slave is warped with Christian, colonial doctrines. Jackson writes “Were you the first to write whose memory they stole?” Although

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seemingly critical of the first Black woman poet she introduced in the collection, her poem “For Gwen, On Her Passing” pays tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks, former Poet Laureate who also hails from the south side of Chicago. It is a humble tribute. Jackson writes: “I am no match for you. And never said I was.” She views Brooks’ words like “mother’s milk” from which she continues to digest throughout her writing process. Part II of the book opens with a Gwendolyn Brooks quote “Who is that bird reporting the storm?” Perhaps this is an appropriate entry into the second section of the book. There are many poems that capture tragedy, but the bird or the person reporting the crimes is not clear. While the first part of the book is a lucid, personal account of migration from the south to Chicago with a pointed focus on the speaker’s relationship to her mother and father, the second section is a bit more ambiguous. The various poems in this section appear to have a multitude of speakers who recount their experiences of the Great Migration. Overall, a Mighty Long Time is an ambitious project that warps primal conceptions of lineage and time. In one of Jackson’s concluding poems “The Ritual Calendar of Yes,” she opens the poem with “Who owns the Time owns the earth.” In this collection, Jackson recreates time and owns her sense of history. The rebellious young child captured at the beginning of the book continues to rebel against constraints on her liberation even as she rewrites the voyage to slavery. This is a lengthy project which could have possibly been extended even more given the fact that some sections are comparatively

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shorter than others. Her poems are grouped under the umbrella of Black experiences pre and post the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Some of her poems even explore the African diaspora outside of the United States. This collection certainly gives the reader much to chew on and a vision of America before red line trains took off along the tracks in Chicago. Jackson skillfully explores how African Americans have had to change their relationship to their land based on time. Within her book, she brings those different lands together and creates a new history which challenges readers to imagine what existed before their current perception of Blackness and their origins.

Trouble Sleeping by Abdul Ali New Issues Press Reviewed by Rochelle Spencer Trouble Sleeping, Abdul Ali’s first poetry collection, is cinematic in scope, with many of the poems positioning film or photography as something akin to participating in a waking dream. Ali claims “Spike Lee narrates my dreams,” and ironically, Ali’s often dreamy references to pop culture saturate his collection’s “real-world” depictions of racism, loneliness, and alienation with truth. Divided into five sections titled “blink,” Trouble Sleeping mimics the rush and exhilaration of our rapidly changing technology. When the poem “Broken Sleep in Four Parts” describes how a natural body reaction—the blink

of an eye—becomes a “ten-minute film/scratching behind the eyelids,” we better understand our bodies’ deep connection to technology. Trouble Sleeping is an AfroSurreal text, one unafraid to describe the multiple ways present-day technologies (film and music) affect the way we live. “How to Begin a Short Film,” the first poem in the collection, describes the sights and sounds of a young New Yorker’s life, in cinematic terms. From allusions recognizable to Gen Y and Gen X (9/11, the deaths of Biggie and Tupac) to older memories commemorated through the technology of records and photograph (Billie Holiday’s wail, flashy zoot suits, the sounds of Donny Hathaway and Miles Davis, and the images Gordon Parks), the poem is a collision of sight and sound. Ali intersperses a personal narrative—a mother’s cruel remark to a son, an uncle seeking salvation through art—with these larger cultural images. In this way, an individualistic poem represents something broader and more human: our complex negotiations with technology—we want our lives to be remembered and recorded, not as they actually are, but how we wish they were. “How to Begin a Short Film” explores an idea—a photograph’s ability to steal your soul (“cameras stealing/all those hungry faces”)-- replicated in other poems such as “American Classic” and “Amistad.” In “American Classic,” the poem’s narrator views Birth of a Nation, and in “Amistad,” he watches the Steven Spielberg film and experiences “[h]istory so close it hums.” No recording can capture the actual experience of a lynching or the trauma of Middle Passage, but Ali’s poems suggest technol-

ogy’s ability to allow us to share and relive experiences. Yet how much of Ali’s argument can we embrace? WPA recordings have given us access to the voices of former slaves but how much do we know about their day-today lives? With our smartphones and cameras, we can record our voices and memories; still, how much emotional content do we actually share? How much of our souls have been lost or transmitted through our media? Trouble Sleeping indicates we actually transmit a great deal. In fact, Ali’s poetry is at its sharpest and most truthful when highly realistic images are juxtaposed against music’s recorded sounds or the simulated imagery of film and video games. “Elegy (for Troy Davis),” the longest poem in the collection, and perhaps the most earnest, somehow feels less poignant than “South Ozone Park,” though both poems pay serious tribute to Black lives and what those lives mean in a nation that continuously limits Black people’s freedom. But while “Elegy” poses a series of rhetorical questions (“Why are our mothers crying?/Why am I not crying?”), “South Ozone Park” takes on the more daring task of investigating them. By comparing Black lives to “a pinball game” and realizing that real-life gangsters and street hustlers do sometimes behave like “a superhero/ unafraid of bullets,” we understand the surreal nature of our own lives. And the idea that our lives replicate the over-the-top violence produced by our films and music is unsettling. Ali’s poetry is sharp and visceral because it’s so unexpected. Perhaps the poem “Counting Sundays” is the best exam-

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ple of how Ali’s cultural references add new meaning to a familiar idea. In it he pays homage to Robert Hayden’s classic poem “Winter Sundays,” returns to the idea of Black fatherhood and masculinity. When Ali remixes lyrics from a mournful Mary J. Blige song and shows a father-son’s shared appreciation for 1990s hip-hop (Biggie and Heavy D.), he reveals the depth of a relationship that’s both painful and loving. Trouble Sleeping includes a foreword by the poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, and it’s no coincidence that Ellis titles the foreword “A Mighty Mise-en-Concern.” In Trouble Sleeping, Ali directs a cinematic collection, one that’s post-1995 understanding of black masculinity is defined by gentleness and enriched through references to hiphop, film, and pop culture.

Lighting the Shadow by Rachel Eliza Griffiths Four Way Books Khadijah Queen "Lighting the shadow, a woman / crawls out beneath her own war." Thus lines 27 and 28 from the first poem in the book deliver both title and theme. Working as a frontispiece, "The Dead Will Lead You" creates a sprawling image for the reader, introducing a troubled landscape that the speaker (and, by extension, the reader) must fight through. The landscape: a country with "scarred meadows, red / blue, white. The star-flung sky scrapes / gold grass" – an untethered world populated by statues, cries,

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and animals, "ashen hills, the expanse of desert / shorn with prayers." Such is the wild, vivid, grief-ravaged vision Rachel Eliza Griffiths invites the reader to witness. "At the gates there is a figure believed to be a man. Placed upon a pedestal his head is raised & turned […] As though he is listening for permission from the stone he is." Thus, even the inanimate object may have the power to hear, rejecting the idea that anyone or anything is unaffected by its surrounds. The poems' fierce and unflinching gaze leaves little unseen, parsing devastation wrought by loss and heartbreak that spans both personal and public histories, intertwining them with new and ancient mythologies, homages to the dead, and stark examinations of violence in the world we live in. Standout lines abound: "The eyes of your killers are dry. / The eyes of your killers are dry;" "I hang my flesh on the French door as her light shakes my hunger into sequins;” "The smell of captive animals drags its truth beneath the breeze;” "I am giving you the image of our insides splayed like wings in daylight. I am giving you the opposite of the negative, which is fire.” Lighting the Shadow's relentless intensity sears afterimages in the reader's mind, fueled by a duende that stirs emotion like so much alchemy. The potent "Elegy" and "Anti-Elegy" comment on the racial violence heaped upon African-Americans in this country, and the grief and loss such violence triggers, with active devotion: "I held their million heads in my lap when the bodies were taken away. […] I wash their eyelids with mint. […] I wont leave them.” Yet no matter how many have died violently, the poems call out the injustice of such deliberate destruction, with birch imag-

ery that nods to Robert Frost's famous existential poem "Birches": "The hearts, terra cotta blue, were buried beneath birch.” Then, calls upon the reader: "Will you finish this poem or give the back of its mouth / to the gun?.” Tough with feeling and far from sentimental, Griffiths' poems use the artist's eye for detail to suffuse into and extract meaning from emblematic referents to the phoenix, all kinds of birds, flowers and flame, rolling heads, ghosts, always women, and of course Frida Kahlo. The poems often behave as a kind of psychological ekphrasis – a woman in situ with mythology and memory, acted upon by greater forces than simply human. A few poems, though, could do with some tightening and more of the unexpected, momentum-infused turns that make others gorgeous. For example, overdone alliteration and overused images: "A little finch of infinity makes its way through the blue interior,” or the "bluebird of happiness" that finds its way into an otherwise powerful poem about the delicacy of human life. A much better example of the repetitive bird imagery: "She is a cardinal in the hive of language.” The long poem "July 22, 2012," like some of the other date poems, loses strength when it becomes choppy with randomly collaged imagery presented more strongly elsewhere in the book, though moments of loveliness exist, like this one: "me unborn & my father / just a breeze / inside of a young woman's hand.” While messy at times, that messiness can be said to mirror the nature of life itself. The sprawl of heart and hurt serve to heighten the urgency behind the book's composite of human evolution—spiritual, emotional and

bodied, completely in the world, however wrecked, and even, at times, finding joy. Griffiths writes: "Ruin, I have lived / inside your estate,” and guides us through that living with compelling and difficult beauty.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James Riverhead Reviewed by Sidik Fofana Marlon James’s latest novel takes us on a border-crossing, genre-bending crash through the shantytowns of Jamaica and beyond, using as a springboard the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976. Enlisted to tell the tale is a ragtag cluster of groupies, journalists, dead politicians, profiteers, and "rude boys" turned CIA pawns who speak of political corruption of two parties vying for the support of an international star and subsequently the heart of a nation. These characters are privy to inside information. Some know why Marley, who is simply referred to as “the Singer,” was shot. Others know who did it. Although, Marley’s controversial Smile Jamaica concert is generally cited as the shooting’s official impetus, the murder attempt’s lasting reverberations tell a more fascinating story. “Like there’s a version of this story that’s not really about him, but about the people around him,” spouts the fictitious Rolling Stone journalist Alex Pierce. “The ones who come and go might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja.”

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More than merely a social artifact, A Brief History of Seven Killings is a clinic in voice-driven narrative. James proves to be a masterful juggler of dramatis personae, a ventriloquist unhindered by race, gender, age, or sexual predilection. He deserves special distinction for giving dimension to characters who, before this, seem to have only existed in parody. Papa-Lo, the "batty-boy" hating don of the underworld, is offset by Weeper, the out-ofthe-closet strong-arm man. No two patois speakers are alike. People who are supposed to be neutral get their hands dirty. Characters come face to face with being in too deep, a realization that often occurs too late (for some fate only catches with them up across the sea in the Bronx). Above all, a sort of self-effacing, fatalistic marionettist force governs this section of Kingston, (which James rechristens as the gothic “Copenhagen City”). Marley’s would-be assassins never face any formal reckoning for their crimes, but themselves become the victims of a more frenetic justice blindly meted out by a codeless underworld. The seven principle characters involved in the reggae legend’s murder plot all face their end violently; they are tied, mugged, ambushed, shot up, or expire obscurely in a prison cell. In this way, the novel is a car bomb mixture of Julius Caesar and Final Destination, where death reconciles all and the only logic is illogic. A Jamaican rudie searching for the meaning of life might do well to observe that planning one man’s murder prompts the universe to plan your own, but the reality is far more bleak and bludgeoning. As one character puts it, “…killing don’t need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness.”

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James does not shy away from the scurrility of his narrators. They’re rough, lewd, and unapologetically homophobic. At times, one gets the notion that they love hearing the sound of their own voices. impressionism is eschewed for authenticity; every linguistic riff exhausted for better or for worse. The secularity doubles up as a neck-wringing defense for the novel itself. Some novels are written by armchair poets, it seems to say, but this one will be written by the thrum of the common tongue. If that means “batty boy” and “pussy hole” and “bamba clot” must be uttered fifty times they will--while daring one to question their literary place. Nevertheless, the “low and lovely” points of view imbue the novel with impending spirit of reggae and revolution. The novel’s interweaving plots, like the Copenhagen City getaway cars they depict, sweep up a reader fast once they reach full steam. Seven Killings is a demanding read, clocking in at just over 700 pages, but flows like an intelligently mappedout reality show confessional. They will be some who say it is the millennium’s As I Lay Dying, The Wire of Kingston West, the next Great Caribbean novel. Of course, much smoke would have to clear in the coming months before such definitive statements can be taken seriously, but as far as this summer, everyone’s eyes should be on Trenchtown. ★

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Photo credit: Shef Reynolds

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erg at Em f Writin o r o s s C AA P’s Profe is, the N s sociate s ri A C n e a h ing The r of T sim is s, includ ve Edito k Jabari A ti o u o c b e e x y; What twelv ege, E thor of and Wh u son Coll ’t a n e ld th u down Sho e, and it, Who sim sat A y a . magazin S y e n n a o f H g can: Who C Taste o n writin A o N Word ti d c n fi a n Asim, FA no Means; n) G’Ra o ersity M s Obama iv 2 n # U his Only lumbia tor (and t novel, with Co ’s debu contribu im s ic a A s r o M lde didate, on the e rsation e v n ovel. o N c for a erican m A exn A ng: r y Hub The Stro to Litera y e a s s e h an t wit th tributed intersec n g o n r c o u u tr o o S y that im: Y ly The lso said G'Ra As a es in On e . m 'v ry e u to o th od s how ent. Y tell a go ploring movem to r s e a tt m a w o lc vel ives M g the no for socia n Black L ti le ri ic h w e v ackseat eful goal in take a b on a us primary ti ry c ta fi n e is mm ways ocial co In what n does s e h W ? mentary d story? g a goo in ll te to

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Asim MosaicMagazine.org

Jabari Asim: Where fiction is concerned, I think social commentary should always take a backseat to telling a good story. When I want to create straightforward social commentary, I’ll usually choose to write an essay or an op-ed piece. I guess when writing fiction I’m more into description than prescription. Chinua Achebe said that writers don’t give prescriptions; they give headaches. Similarly, I think it was Mao who said if art is to succeed as propaganda it must first succeed as art. I try to focus on the art. If some kind of credible commentary emerges from that, fine, but it tends to be organic rather than intentional. GA: At a few of your signings you've mentioned the ambition of completing more novels that portray particular decades in African American life, somewhat in the mold of August Wilson's playwriting oeuvre. What draws you to that terrain? JA: I’ve always been mesmerized by writers who create fiction about life in the city, from Ann Petry and Gwendolyn Brooks to folks like John Edgar Wideman and Edward P. Jones. In some way, all of them have been influences. The impulse to follow a specific urban community over time comes from August Wilson more than any other source, as well as his loving, thorough depictions of men just hanging out and spinning tales. GA: One of the novel's protagonists, Lorenzo “Guts” Tolliver, is based on your grandfather's muscled and mysterious right-hand man that you have memories of from childhood. When did you know that he was going to become a character you could build a novel around? JA: Initially I didn’t know that Guts would be so central to the events that unfold in Only The Strong but I did know

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he would be present in some capacity. I got fascinated with him when he emerged in A Taste Of Honey, my earlier book in which he plays a supporting role. I wanted to know more about him and gambled that readers would too. GA: In an era in which TV shows more commonly follow anti-heroes than traditional, ethically laudable ones, your readership is perhaps more prepared to accept and contextualize characters like Ananias Goode and Guts, men of fluid morals forged by their circumstances. Do you think humanizing morally ambiguous black characters and sketching the ways they are shaped by social and historical forces helps to undermine some of the myths about black pathology? JA: I’m skeptical that the approach you describe can contribute substantially toward undermining those myths. People who want to adhere to what Toni Morrison calls the master narrative will continue to do so, regardless of black artists’ resistance to that narrative. Many authors whom we revere and continue to discuss, writers such as Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Morrison and Ernest Gaines to name just a few, have brilliantly presented black characters as wonderfully complex and ambiguous human beings. Yet the myths persist. GA: Even though Gateway City is an invented, embellished stand-in for St. Louis, critical reception of the novel has heralded your ability to capture a particular Midwestern sensibility, of a particular community under specific historical circumstances. Do you feel any kind of pressure to do your hometown justice? What was especially important to capture about St. Louis in both Only the Strong and A Taste of Honey?

JA: I didn’t feel particular pressure because there hasn’t been a lot of fiction set in the St. Louis I know. I remember reading one or two of Jonathan Franzen’s novels that refer to a fictional St. Louis, but the setting was unrecognizable to me, more like another planet than another city. I’ve always admired writers like Quincy Troupe and Eugene B. Redmond, to name a couple, who’ve created great writing about the St. Louis area, albeit in poetic form. I thought that I could capture important things to know about the city by creating persuasive portraits of its people. GA: The dialogue especially seems to achieve a substantial verisimilitude with the distinctive rhythms and twang of Missourian speech. How conscious were you of the unique way that St. Louis people spoke when you were growing up? JA: I didn’t realize that we had a notable accent until I went to college in Chicago. Even though St. Louis was just six hours away, my friends from the Windy City frequently marveled over the way I said words like “car” and “park.” GA: Your first collection of related stories, A Taste of Honey, was written in the evenings, somewhat as an unwinding exercise, after spending daytime hours writing and researching The N Word. What were the circumstances surrounding the creation of Only the Strong, and how was the experience of writing it similar or different from writing A Taste of Honey? JA: Well, A Taste of Honey, really laid the groundwork for Only The Strong. I had plenty of characters and no shortage of settings. My primary work involved giving them all something to do and conflicts to negotiate. I didn’t want

it to be a novel in which “nothing happens.” GA: Particularly at the college and grad school levels, young writers are often placed in positions in which they are expected to specialize in one kind of writing, whether that's fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or journalism. As someone who has continually produced in each of those mediums, what advice do you have to up and coming writers who would like to achieve the same versatility? JA: Forcing young writers to stick to one genre doesn’t make any sense to me. I always practiced every genre, when I was coming up. I had a portfolio divided by category: poetry, drama, fiction, journalism, and I continually refreshed it. I kept samples in an accordion file case with a handle on it. My wife actually used to lug it around with her. That’s how I got my first poem and short story published. In each instance, she met an editor who was looking for work and was able to show mine on the spot. Even if your workshop or MFA program discourages working in multiple genres, it would be prudent to do it anyway, even if you have to do it on the side. GA: You're the Graduate Program Director at Emerson College's creative writing MFA program. How has your dual life as both writing instructor and practitioner influenced your approach to those respective roles? Was there anything you learned via creating Only The Strong that became a lesson to your fiction students? JA: I always try to lead my workshops as a writer talking to other writers. Whenever my personal experiences can help lead to a particular insight, I share them without hesitation, and my students can ask me anything about my process. One thing that I often share about writing Only The Strong is the importance of listening to one’s

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characters. I had done a lot of preliminary work around the idea that the novel would trace the lives of three characters, Guts Tolliver, Dr. Artinces Noel and Charlotte Divine. But a fourth character, Ananias Goode, kept elbowing his way into the story. At first I fought him off but I eventually gave in and sought ways to fit him into the narrative. I’m glad I did because the book is stronger as a result. Based on that experience, I encourage my students to maintain a flexible attitude even if they have scrupulously planned the structure and direction of their story or novel. GA: You've said that your work is greatly influenced by your life experience as a father and husband. How is that sensibility manifest in this book? JA: I’m very fulfilled as a husband and father; my relationships with my wife and children are most important and most satisfying. That probably has a lot to do with my artistic inclinations. But I’m not just interested in family relationships in literature because of that. I’m also interested as a reader and writer. Relationships and households pique my curiosity. Accordingly, I try to portray them with utmost care and deliberate selection of details. For example, Only The Strong contains only one scene featuring Detective Grimes and his wife; they are minor characters. But I wanted their scene to be as evocative and memorable as the scenes between Guts and Pearl and the interaction between Artinces Noel and Ananias Goode. GA: To write The N Word, you had to immerse yourself in some virulently racist materials. Did you look to any 1970s culture to inspire the right mood for Only the Strong?

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JA: I did spend some time with 70s-era artifacts, and it was considerably more fun than the research I did for The N Word. I made a Guts Tolliver playlist that included a number of wonderful songs from various artists of that era, including Jerry Butler, Tyrone Davis, The Dells, The Originals and the Jackson Five. I also spent time with Johnson Publication magazines like Ebony and Jet; most of the references to them in the book are taken from actual issues. GA: Since The N Word is one of your better-known titles, the use of that epithet in the novel's dialogue is sure to turn some heads. In The N Word, you establish some terms and conditions under which use of the n word in literature is acceptable and perhaps instructive and useful. What makes you comfortable employing the term in Only The Strong? JA: I argue in that book that art is one of the categories in which usage makes sense. Not gratuitous use, mind you, but when employed in art that reveals something about a character and/or advances our understanding of the world we live in. That includes a whole range of art, from N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police” to Stevie Wonder’s “Living For The City” to nearly everything by August Wilson. While it’s not for me to suggest that my work merits comparison with those, I am comfortable with placing it in that tradition. GA: I'm interested in the novel's subtitle. That the story is "an American novel" might be something that would be taken for granted if the novel wasn't set in the inner city and centered on black characters. It's a provocative subtitle in view of the frequent ghettoization of black authors and black literature, or their confinement to the "AfricanAmerican interest" section in bookstores. Is the subtitle a

way of hinting at the novel's broader relevance? JA: Yeah, I had this terrible fear that it would be mislabeled as “urban fiction” because it takes place in a city. “Urban fiction” tends to comprise books about pimping preachers, ballers and strippers. There’s a place for those books, to be sure, but I’d like to think that Only The Strong has more in common with the works of John Edgar Wideman, Walter Mosley, Stuart Dybek and Richard Russo. The “American” subtitle is meant to encourage that kind of thinking. GA: After the New York Times published a recommended summer reading list totally devoid of works by writers of color, Melissa Harris-Perry shouted out Only The Strong as a book by a black author that was an especially incisive read in an era increasingly defined by racialized police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. Talk about your own efforts to elevate writers of color and encourage diversity awareness in literature. JA: I’ve been working as an advocate for writers of color since the ’80s, when I co-founded a literary magazine called Eyeball. Many of the writers we featured in the publication and in a companion reading series have gone on to great things, including Kevin Powell, Paul Beatty, Tracy K. Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, Willie Perdomo, John Keene, Sapphire and many others. Around the same time I became book editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and subsequently deputy editor of Washington Post Book World. In both of those positions I worked tirelessly to bring critical exposure to writers of color. The most distressing part was knowing I could never bring them all the attention they deserved, nor could I secure coverage for every book. But I did the best I could, and I continue to do so in the pages of The Crisis. ★

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excerpt

Only the Strong by Jabari Asim Agate Publishing Only the Strong is set in the year 1970 in Gateway City, a fictionalized version of St. Louis. The novel begins with Lorenzo “Guts” Tolliver, a retired “leg breaker” who spent 20 years as the muscle for a local crime figure. This excerpt reveals how he got his nickname. That night, Lorenzo woke to the sound of weeping. His father was sitting on the side of his bed. It was still dark, and the dim glow of a streetlight outside his window made a shadowy mask of his father’s features. “Papa?” “It’s me, Lorenzo.” “Papa, what’s wrong? What happened?” Chauncey Tolliver said nothing. Lorenzo climbed out of bed and turned on the light. His father’s bow tie was askew. Dirt and blood soiled his collar and the front of his suit. Lorenzo stared at

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the stains. “Where’s Mama?” he asked. His father wrung his hands. He closed his eyes, clenched them tight. He opened them and, finding the world unchanged, he began to cry even more. In between wracking sobs, he gave his son the bad news. “On the way back from the ball, we had a flat tire,” he began. “I pulled over to fix it. A couple of the lug nuts were stuck, so I was going slower than usual. Your mama needed to stretch her legs.” This time Lorenzo closed his eyes. Unlike his father, he kept them shut. “A car hit her. She’s gone, Lorenzo. Our beautiful Lucille is gone.” The funeral was a Butlers and Chauffeurs Ball in reverse, all of white society’s servants again decked out in finery not to celebrate but to send one of their own to Glory. It was a dizzying experience for Lorenzo: sympathetic mourners clasped his hands, others squeezed his shoulders, and still others chanted “God bless” softly into his ear until the voices and faces of his parents’ friends and coworkers—the Logans, the Lennixes, the Morrises—all melted together into a confusing, heartbreaking mess. In the weeks that followed, Chauncey became a child again. He forgot how to feed himself, couldn’t tie his shoes properly, or couldn’t roll his own cigarettes. Refusing to sleep in the bed he had shared with Lucille, every night he sat in his chair in the front parlor until he nodded off. When Lorenzo propped up his father and buttoned his shirt for him in the morning, Chauncey would

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drop his chin to his chest and mutter the same mournful refrain: “It should have been me, son. It should have been me.” At night, when Lorenzo spooned canned soup (one of the few things he could make) between his father’s lips, he said it again: “It should have been me.” Once Lorenzo woke in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke. His father had fallen asleep in the chair with a cigarette lit, nearly setting himself and the apartment ablaze. How he made it to work every day was a mystery beyond Lorenzo’s wisdom—but it turned out the mystery was solved when Lorenzo came home from school and found an eviction notice pasted to their door. He took down the note, resigned to discussing it with his father when he returned from wherever he went when he was pretending to be on the job. But there was no need to wait: Chauncey was already home. Lorenzo discovered him slumped in his chair. It was only when he tried and failed to revive his father that he noticed the foam around his lips and the empty glass and container of roach powder on the table beside him. Lorenzo put his ear on his father’s pulseless chest and marveled that a body could get cold so fast. Heavy-set in life, Chauncey Tolliver was even heavier in death. Still, Lorenzo resolved to lift him from his chair and wash him clean before surrendering him to the outside world. Pressing himself against his father’s back, he thrust his hands under Chauncey’s armpits and began to drag him slowly backward, toward the bathroom. About halfway down the hall, Chauncey’s bulk and Lorenzo’s grief became too much. The son collapsed, bringing his father’s stiffening body down on top of him. There,

in the fading light of afternoon, he wrapped his arms around his father and wept. When he had cried himself out, he slid out from under Chauncey, went to the bathroom and filled a pail. He washed his father in the hall, put a blanket under him and dragged him back to the bed he’d shared with Lucille. He dressed the body in Chauncey’s best suit, made sure his bow tie was straight. He packed a bag with a few clothes, kissed his father’s clammy brow, and turned toward the exit. Suddenly remembering, he rushed back to his parents’ room and rummaged through his father’s drawers. Finally he wrapped his fingers around Chauncey’s treasured box of cufflinks. Then, after one last gaze back, he stepped out and closed the door. * In a tidy little cottage on Finney Ave., Alice Logan summoned her husband to dinner. Passing through the living room, she paused at the front window. “Phil,” she said, “there’s someone outside.” Cephus Logan stepped out onto the porch. The figure on the lower steps was immense, with shoulder muscles visible beneath the fabric of his shirt. Though the stranger easily made two of him, Logan approached him without fear. “Hello,” he called, and the figure turned. Even in the dusk Logan recognized the facial structure, which perfectly blended the features of Chauncey and Lucille Tolliver, former king and queen of the Butlers and Chauffeurs Ball. “Young Tolliver, is that you?”

“Lorenzo, sir .... My father’s dead.” Where Lorenzo’s mother had been towering and stout, Mrs. Logan was runty and slight. Where Lorenzo’s father had been massive and powerful, Mr. Logan was short and thin. But he had his own kind of strength. Thick, corded veins ran up and down his forearms. Where Chauncey and Lucille loved to laugh and dance, the Logans preferred to read and pray. But they were kind people, and Mr. Logan’s weird fondness for sweet potatoes aside, not the types to get under anybody’s skin. Lorenzo, who seemed as if he would never stop growing, often felt as if he was living in a doll’s house. He learned to duck while passing beneath their doorways. He was silent and awkward during his first year under their roof, but in time he grew accustomed to them, and they to him. Then one night shortly after he turned sixteen, Lorenzo entered the house to the sound of something he had seldom heard: the Logans arguing. “If you’re really still waiting on the police to do something, you’re going to be still waiting a long, long time,” Mr. Logan was saying. “They think the only good Negro is a dead one.” “I always thought somebody should just do something,” Mrs. Logan said. “She was murdered and she was one of my best friends. Lucille didn’t deserve to die like that.” “We don’t know exactly what happened.”

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“What more do we need to know?”

say your daddy’s boss was in the second car.”

Mr. Logan didn’t answer. Mrs. Logan looked up and saw her husband staring at bulky Lorenzo, silently filling the doorway.

Guts thought of his parents dancing cheek-to-cheek before leaving for the ball. He thought of his father slipping away day by day, sick from guilt and loneliness. Then he stood up. He looked down at Mr. Logan. “May I be excused?”

“My mother died in an accident,” he said. Mr. Logan motioned toward the table. “Sit down, son.” Mrs. Logan dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “Excuse me,” she said. Lorenzo stepped aside to enable her to pass. Then he joined Mr. Logan at the table. “You want some ice water?” “No. I want to know what happened to my mother. Sir.” Mr. Logan took out his handkerchief and held it under the faucet. He soaked it with cold water, wrung it out, and wiped his forehead. Then he joined Lorenzo at the table. “As you know, your parents worked for a rich white family. Word was, the lady of the house was stuck on your father. Wouldn’t leave him alone. Told him he’d better do what she wanted or she’d holler rape. What could your father do? We believe her husband found out. He didn’t say anything, just kept making your father sweat. But Chauncey wouldn’t break and your mother, well, she didn’t have any idea. The night of the ball, a car ran your folks off the road. Another car came by, fired shots. Your mother got hit. Some people leaving the ball say it was white folks in those cars. Some of them even

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Mr. Logan looked as if he wanted to say more. But he just nodded. Lorenzo went to the little room he’d called home and opened the chest of drawers. When he came out, Mr. Logan was gazing thoughtfully out the front window. He watched as Lorenzo walked to the front door and put his hand on the knob. Lorenzo turned to him. “Thank you for all you’ve done for me. Someday I’ll pay you back.” “Lorenzo, I planned to tell you the truth some day. Just not so soon.” Three years is not soon, Lorenzo thought. He didn’t need to say it out loud because he knew Mr. Logan was as aware of that truth as he was. “Thank you kindly,” he said. He didn’t wait to say goodbye to Mrs. Logan. He just tipped his cap and went out the door. He walked down Finney Avenue toward the river, carrying a few changes of clothes in a battered satchel and his box of cufflinks in his hand. Lorenzo had been an indifferent student, reserving what little enthusiasm he had for gym class. On Sumner High’s track, he astounded the skinny sprinters by thundering

past them in the 100-yard dash. In the cramped gym, he could do chin-ups until the bar appeared to bend under his exertions. But school, like his life up to that point, was done. It was time for something new. * Lorenzo wound up half-asleep on a bench in the park outside the train station, his satchel and box beside him. He had a handful of dollars and he thought he might catch a train somewhere, anywhere his meager funds could take him. It was early morning, and the ducks in the pond in front of him were already awake. Inside the station, Ananias Goode was fresh from a trip to Chicago. He had a small entourage with him: some muscle, a runner, his wife and infant son. He waited while his men collected his family’s bags. Once outside, Goode ushered his family into the backseat of a waiting car while his men loaded the trunk. He looked up and saw a husky youth sitting in the park across the street and was reminded of his young self. He guessed this manchild was newly arrived from the Deep South, friendless as he once was, looking—hoping—for a chance to get a leg up. Lorenzo stared at the ducks in the pond, entranced. He was drawn to their stolid serenity, the unruffled but constant attention they paid to the ducklings paddling tentatively across the water’s surface. “Hey!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Lorenzo noticed two swaggering young men approaching fast. They were black, not much older than him, early twenties maybe, and neither could match him in size. But they wore fearless expressions and moved with the knowing confidence of the street. Lorenzo ignored them, keeping his eyes on the ducks. “Hey!” The second holler was loud enough to land in the ears of Goode and his men. They all turned toward the sound. Looking back, Guts often wondered what possessed the two thugs to mess with him in the first place. He looked formidable even sitting down. Perhaps he looked so distracted that they felt bold enough to take a chance. “You heard me, nigger,” the first thug said. “What you got in that bag?” “Fuck the bag. I want that nice little box right there,” the second one said. Lorenzo looked up and took in his surroundings. There were only the ducks and a group of serious-looking men across the street, standing around a pair of expensive cars. “Why you looking around?” the first thug asked. “You looking for help?” For the first time, Lorenzo looked directly at his antagoContinued on page 50

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#BLACKLIV a lesson plan

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VESMATTER The Baltimore Uprising began six days after the April 12, 2015 arrest of 25-year old Freddie Gray. Gray, who went by the nickname Pepper, grew up in the Gilmor Homes public housing project in West Baltimore. In 2008, his mother won a lead paint lawsuit on behalf of Gray and his two sisters. Court documents identified Gray as being four grade levels behind in reading. Settlements in lead paint exposure court cases are so common in Gray’s neighborhood that local residents refer to them as “lead checks.” According to various reports of Gray’s arrest on April 12th, he was sitting outside, made eye contact with a police officer, and ran. He was apprehended, found to be carrying a switchblade style knife, arrested, and placed in a police van. Gray fell into a coma while inside that police van. He was taken to a trauma center and passed away seven days after his arrest, on April 19th. Gray sustained spinal injuries while in police custody, but the actual cause of death as determined by the medical examiner was a broken neck, caused when he slammed into

by Eisa Nefertari Ulen MosaicMagazine.org

the back of the police transport van. The head injury Gray sustained matched a bolt in the back of the van. The knife found on Gray would later be identified by Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby as legal under Maryland state law, raising even more questions about why Gray was placed in police custody and what happened to him during the three stops the van made before Gray received the medical attention he required. The protests over Gray’s injuries that began on Saturday, April 18th drew hundreds of people to the Western District police station, spread through the city, increased in size following Gray’s death and funeral, and soon spread throughout the country before they ended on May 2nd, the day after Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges, including one murder charge, had been brought against the six officers involved in Gray’s death. The Baltimore Uprising did more than just pressure the state to file charges against six police officers; it also increased the public discourse around issues related to #BlackLivesMatter, helped shift the nation to a culture of accountability with regard to policing, and reinvigorated the debate about post-9/11 militarization of local police forces. The Baltimore Uprising also led to local curfews, closures of area shopping malls, and shut down one Major League Baseball game. Protestors burned down a CVS and looted stores, and protestors cleaned the streets in front of those stores and then danced to House Music in the streets they had cleaned. Originally referred to as the Baltimore Riots, the 2015

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Uprising in Baltimore will be studied for years to come. Though the outcomes for the six officers charged in Freddie Gray’s murder are still unknown, young people can engage in meaningful learning about the power of public protest now. These lesson plans encourage learning about the origins of the #BlackLivesMatter movement to enable students to understand the structural organization required to effectively lead nationwide direct action to successful outcomes. The lessons also encourage critical thinking and rigorous interrogation of media portrayals of everyday activists. Opportunities to study language and the power of word choices are also present in these lessons. An entire section is devoted to the Black women associated with the Baltimore Uprising. Finally, the last section of the lesson plan examines youth participation in the Uprising and celebrates the persistence of Black joy in Baltimore specifically and more broadly throughout the African-American community.

I.#BlackLivesMatter: From Trayvon to Tamir, Alesia to Aiyana A. Topics for Discussion 1. A vigilante is any person who takes the law into his own hands. How does this word fit into your understanding of the Trayvon Martin case? 2. Name the victims of police and vigilante policing that you know by heart. What does it feel like to state those names out loud? Why do you think we know so many of these names? 3. Are there any lesser-known names you would like to add to the list of victims of police and vigilante policing? 4. What words would you use to describe the current climate with regard to police interactions with African Americans? 5. How does the current climate with regard to police interactions with African Americans make you feel? 6. What interactions, if any, have you had with local police? 7. How does seeing the police in your neighborhood make you feel? What kinds of things have you seen the police do in your community? 8. Think again about the list of victims of police and vigilante policing that your class came up with. How many of those victims are women? How many are men? Does anything with regard to gender jump out at you as you look of the list of names? 9. Read this “Herstory” of the #BlackLivesMatter movement written by co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter, Alicia Garza. Were you surprised to learn

that three women activists who also self-identify as queer founded this political movement? Were you surprised that these queer Black women founded #BlackLivesMatter after the death of Trayvon Martin? In what ways might the intersectionality of being Black and female and a member of the LGBTQ community enable a deep engagement with the marginalization and silencing of Black men? http://bit.ly/1ge0zlX 10. Listen to this National Public Radio report on #BlackLivesMatter. What are your thoughts about the origins and development of the #BlackLivesMatter movement? http://n.pr/1STYxcw B. Essay Idea Write an essay that tells the history (or “herstory”) of #BlackLivesMatter. As you write, consider the impact #BlackLivesMatter has had on American society and around the world. In your essay, celebrate the fact that three queer Black women loved one Black boy that they never even knew (Trayvon Martin) so much that they started a movement that would honor his life. Consider the fact that their #BlackLivesMatter movement has changed this country – and the world. If you want, use photographs of #BlackLivesMatter protests in places from Paris, to Melbourne, to Delhi to illustrate your essay: http://bit.ly/1Isqv4S C. Additional Activities 1. Search the Internet for a list of women and girls who have been victims of police and vigilante policing. Were you aware that so many girls and women had also been killed by police? Make a poster that honors these women and girls. Consider incorporat-

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ing their pictures and birthdates as you design and draw your poster. 2. The Baltimore Uprising might not have happened, or had such an impact, without the momentum of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Activists like Alicia Garza and Patrise Cullors are often called organizers. (President Barack Obama was a community organizer in Chicago, Illinois before he decided to run for local elected office.) Design and draw a diagram that charts the way the #BlackLivesMatter movement began on social media, grew on the streets of Ferguson, and then continued to grow at protests around the country and around the world. Make sure you show how one tiny online post grew in size and momentum to become a movement because the women who made the movement were organized. 3. Research members of the LGBTQ community who joined the struggle for the liberation of African Americans. Create a bulletin board that celebrates their contributions to the Black freedom struggle in your classroom. http://huff.to/1IPVUSi, http://bit.ly/1IKiw2h, or http://bit.ly/1JOazOR 4. Listen to the song "I’m Dying of Thirst" on Grammy award winning jazz artist Robert Glasper’s album Covered. Listen to the song a second time, and, as it plays, write words or draw pictures that describe how the song makes you feel. Create a list of all the victims of police and vigilante policing you can identify through online research. Write a poem, compose a song, use instruments to express the sound of a fading heartbeat or the last breaths of a man repeating the phrase “I can’t breathe,” or maybe choreograph a dance performance. Use art

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to express how you feel about these losses and to accompany the list of names of victims that you put together. Rehearse and then perform your creative form of expression in honoring these victims.

II. What’s in a Name? A. Topics for Discussion 1. Define the term double standard. Can you think of any double standards with regard to race, the police, and media coverage of Black life? 2. What is the difference between an uprising and a riot? 3. What is the difference between a protester and a thug? 4. What do you see when you look at these images?: http://nym.ag/1JOaI4U 5. Watch this short film about media coverage and race: http://bit.ly/1MSqT23 What is the most important idea conveyed in this short film? What are some other important ideas that the film communicates? B. Essay Idea Write a personal essay about how you felt either watching or participating in a #BlackLivesMatter protest. As you write, be careful about your use of words like thug and protester, uprising and riot. C. Additional Activities 1. Read this Washington Post article about the Baltimore Uprising. Write your own op-ed about the act of naming as a political act. Should elected of-

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ficials have the power to name what the events in Baltimore will be called? Should the media have that power? Or, should ordinary citizens name and claim the events in Baltimore? Whose voice has more legitimacy? Whose voice matters? As you write your op-ed, consider the ways social media have given ordinary citizens greater voiced expression. Think about Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as microphones for the people. http://wapo.st/1ge2mr3 2. A prominent Black male writer named Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and contributes highly anticipated posts to the magazine’s online blog. He is also a native Baltimorean. Read these two blog posts on violence in Black life that he wrote for The Atlantic. After you read and discuss his articles, make a list of all the forms of violence you’ve witnessed against Black bodies. Next to each form of violence you list, write what the response to the violence you saw was. You can use terms like “nothing” or “no response,” “a little” or “some response,” and “a lot” or “big response.” Study your list for a while. Then, write a letter to Coates, telling him whether you agree with his blog posts or not. Is there a double standard about violence and Black bodies? Email or snail mail your letter to the writer, as he just might write you back. Ta-Nehisi Coates on Plunder: http://theatln.tc/1W3MJ6B Ta-Nehisi Coates on Violence in Baltimore: http://theatln.tc/1K5iQJU

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3. Read these books: The Autobiography of Malcolm X with Alex Haley and A Taste of Power by Elaine Brown. Think about the behavior that the authors identify as criminal, or what we might now call “thuggish,” in each book. Think about the revolutionary work done by those same and different characters. In what ways are the authors able to provide a context for readers to understand the criminal behavior in each narrative? Are the authors making excuses for bad behavior, or are they really trying to help the readers understand something in their books? What, exactly, is the thing the authors want readers to understand about crime, the Black experience as they lived it, and redemption through direct political action meant to change the conditions of Black people? Write your own op-ed about the Baltimore Uprising using these two books as references. 4. A Baltimore Orioles baseball game that was scheduled to take place at Camden Yards was cancelled because of protests taking place in the area of the city near the Inner Harbor. Read this statement from Orioles COO (Chief Operating Officer) John P. Angelos. Write a letter to him telling him what you thought of his remarks about the conditions Black people face in Charm City. http://bit.ly/1STZHF0 5. Read Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City by Antero Pietila. You might also want to read this online review of the book. In what ways might the racism in housing described in this book be related to the Baltimore Uprising? In what ways do housing conditions influ-

ence a neighborhood and police officers’ relationships with local residents? Think about the fact that lead paint poisoning is so prevalent in the neighborhood where Freddie Gray grew up that local residents have a nickname for the settlements reached in the lawsuits that families file called “lead checks.” Create an outline of major events described in Pietila’s books that you think might have some relationship with the housing conditions in Freddie Gray’s neighborhood. http://bit.ly/1hlph4K

III. How Do I Look? A. Topics for Discussion 1. Name the television programs, films, and staged performances you’ve seen that are set in Baltimore, Maryland. 2. Perhaps the most popular television shows set in Baltimore are Roc, The Corner, and The Wire. Have you ever watched these programs? What are your thoughts about them? 3. Read this summary of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir The Beautiful Struggle on National Public Radio. Think about this line of the NPR story, a quote from Coates about image and blackness and real human contact: “I do want, Sumari, my son to have some sort of consciousness about what it means to be an African American," says Coates. "I don't want him learning about African Americans from watching TV. I don't even necessarily want him learning about African American strictly from listening to music. I want it to be a lived experience." What do you think Coates means when he says this? What could be problematic about people, any people, knowing

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about Black people only from TV? http://n.pr/1hlpm8r 4. For most of us, the Baltimore Uprising was something we saw on TV, but for the residents of Baltimore, it was a lived experience. How do you think the experience of watching the Uprising on TV was compared to the experience of protestors at Penn North, the intersection that became the epicenter of the Uprising? 5. The article accompanying these pictures claims these are scenes from the Uprising that most people won’t see on cable news or local television. Have you ever seen these images from the Baltimore Uprising? Why do you think no reporters asked to hear the voice of the Black woman who was caught on camera cleaning the streets of the Penn North area? Does her life, and her work in the community, matter? http://bit.ly/1ge35st 6. Look at these images from the Baltimore Uprising. As you view each image, share the way they make you feel. Proud? Angry? Sad? Joyous? Confused? Defiant? Not sure? http://bit.ly/1Eb1b1z 7. Now examine this Time magazine cover. What do this image and the two dates visible in the lower left corner say about the Baltimore Uprising? What do you think the editors who chose this photo intended to communicate to readers? Is this cover effective? Do you think it’s important that an amateur photographer and Baltimore City resident named Devin Allen took this photo and not a professional flown in from somewhere else to cover the Upris-

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ing? http://bit.ly/1Eb1hpO 8. Scroll through Devin Allen’s Instagram page. How do these beautiful portraits of everyday people make you feel? https://instagram.com/bydvnlln/ B. Essay Idea Pretend Devin Allen’s Instagram page is an art gallery or a museum and you have been hired by The Baltimore Sun newspaper to write a review of his work. Write a review of Allen’s photography that describes the main theme(s) in his portraits, the primary subjects of his work (who and what the photographs are about), and gives your opinion on the quality of his work. Mention the Time magazine cover in your review, and make sure you consider the political and social impact of Allen’s art. C. Additional Activities 1. Read The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Note the way the author maps the middle class exodus of Jews, followed by African Americans, up the northwest corridor from Baltimore City to Baltimore County. Think about your own community. Are there patterns of movement from one portion of your town or city to the other? Talk to older residents to understand these patterns better. Ask these older residents what they think housing patterns have done over the generations to the area where you live. Also ask them how patterns in housing and demographics have influenced the way the community looks. Share the results of these interviews with your class.

IV. Who Runs the World? A. Topics for Discussion 1. What is a feminist? How many people here would self-identify as a feminist?

ferguson

2. Coates writes in his memoir about his relationship with his father, Paul Coates, a former member of the Black Panther Party and founder of Black Classic Press. Scroll through the book list on the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website. Think about the images of the African American experience on this page of book covers. What do images like these say about Black people? Think about the message you would most want to convey about the Baltimore Uprising. Make a collage of images that best communicates your feelings about Freddie Gray and the protests against police brutality that were made in his name. 3. The Beautiful Struggle is the name of Ta-Nehisi Coatesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; book and of an album by Talib Kweli. It is also a phrase that was coined by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and used by African American activists to describe their engagement with the struggle for social justice since the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Write a poem, a short story, a song or rhyme, or create a series of images using the phrase The Beautiful Struggle. In your work, describe the Baltimore Uprising and the movement among Black people from their homes to the streets of the city to demand their right to live. Make sure the art you create answers this question: What makes the struggle to protect the sanctity of Black life beautiful?

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2. Read the definition of Womanist written by Alice Walker in her book In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. How many of us would self-identify as a Womanist? 3. Name the women who emerged as prominent voices of Black Baltimore during the Uprising. What is similar about these women? What makes them different? Would you consider any of them to be feminists or Womanists? Why? B. Essay Idea Write an essay examining Walker’s quote: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” What do you think this quote means? What women from the Baltimore Uprising emerged as Purple, and which, if any, as Lavender? D. Additional Activities 1. View these videos of prominent women in the Baltimore Uprising: Toya Graham - http://bit.ly/1Ioa4bX Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake - http://bit. ly/1IZhDcs Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby http://bit.ly/1SU0ENr Come up with a list of adjectives to describe each woman. Write these adjectives under their names. 2. Pay special attention to Fredericka Gray, Freddie Gray’s twin sister, in the video clip featuring Mayor Rawlings-Blake. Why do you think her statement is so short? If you had to guess, who do you think decided that she would read only a sentence or two? How is her statement at the Mayor’s office in Baltimore different from this statement from Eric Garner’s widow, Esaw Garner, at a press conference organized by Rev Al Sharpton in New York? Which statement sounds more authentic, more honest, to you? http://abcn.ws/1KSW62D

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3. Dr. Stacey Patton wrote an article questioning America’s fascination with Toya Graham. Read it, and consider this paragraph in particular: “Where is celebration of moms whose children have been at the forefront of peaceful protests? Where is the celebration of black mothers and fathers who have been organizing against police violence, against food injustice, and against the violence and looting in Baltimore and beyond? The history of the civil rights movement is one of parents and children joining together on the front lines of the struggle for justice, not one of black parents beating their children. Yet this is the image captivating the nation.” Given your study of images, language, and control of the narrative of the Baltimore Uprising, debate why you think Toya Graham became such a celebrated woman in the Uprising. http://wapo.st/1Ioateu 4. Would Toya Graham, Mayor Rawlings-Blake, and Baltimore State’s Attorney Mosby be considered feminists? Would Womanists be a better term for them? Create a collage of Black women who express your vision of Womanist power.

V. And We Don’t Stop A. Topics for Discussion 1. Examine the coverage of the events that took place at Mondawmin Mall as reported by CNN. Look at the image selected for inclusion with the article. Does the picture of a young person in a white mask appear to be someone participating in the socalled Purge in Baltimore? Look closely. The image is actually a still from the movie called The Purge. Why do you think CNN used this photo in the article? What message does this still image from the film communicate to people who do not carefully

read the caption beneath it? http://cnn.it/1UqmzJp 2. Examine the sequence of events that took place at Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall as posted on social media by African American teachers and reported in Mother Jones. How do these eye-witness versions of the so-called Purge differ from coverage of the same story on CNN? http://bit.ly/1IZhQws 3. Does this online article about youth participation in the Uprising place young people’s anger in context? Do you think this article accurately communicates the frustrations of people your age who live in poverty? http://bit.ly/1OThEgn 4. Tara Huffman offers three things adults can do to support young people in Baltimore after the Uprising. Do you think her three suggestions for action are good ones? Are these things young people in your community need from adults? http://osf.to/1DtfSSR B. Essay Idea Read news accounts of gang member participation in the Baltimore Uprising. Use your savvy ability to seek accurate, balanced reporting of gangs during the Uprising. Write an article based on the reported facts you research that describes what young Black people with gang affiliations did during the 2015 Baltimore Uprising. C. Additional Activities 1. Watch this montage of video images taken at Penn North after the announcement that charges would be brought against the six officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray. What does this rich expression of artistic diversity say about the resilience, beauty, and power of the Black community in Baltimore? What might this video say about Black people everywhere? Make your own video celebrating this one success in the ongoing struggle to seek justice for Freddie Gray. What forms of artistic expression best communicate

your class’ resilience, beauty, and power? http://bit. ly/1McSkVa 2. Watch this video, also taken at the Penn North celebration. What does the diversity of the people present at this important intersection say about the city of Baltimore and the multihued integrity of the #BlackLivesMatter movement? Research the terms ally, coalition, unity, and divided we fall. Use these terms in a response piece you write about the Penn North celebration. http://bit.ly/1M80o7X 3. Listen to the young man introduced as Brother Rose at the Baltimore City Hall victory rally. Do you agree or disagree with his assertions? Listen to the entire speech, then listen again and press pause as he makes each point to discuss them with your classmates. Why is a substantive statement at the victory rally important to bring the Baltimore Uprising to a successful close? Why is it important that Brother Rose talk about what should happen next? Write your own victory speech. How much of your speech is in agreement with Brother Rose’s? How much of your speech is focused on next steps? http:// bit.ly/1Ncph0M 4. Be a change maker. Identify the issues that are most pressing to youth in your community. Organize a movement around these issues and work together with allies who support your efforts to create positive outcomes. 5. The complete story of the Baltimore Uprising has not yet been written. Write it. Now. 6. Lastly, just take a moment to celebrate the fierce beauty, persistent tenderness, and glowing power of Black people. Scroll through and feel the beautiful struggle, the love. Just because we don’t stop. http:// bzfd.it/1MPAK9M ★

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around town Freelance photographer Marcia E. Wilson gallivants around NYC looking for literary events to spotlight on the "Around Town" page. She may be at a reading near you. For more visit MosaicMagazine.org.

On June 30, 2015, friends and fans gathered at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY to hear Naomi Jackson (top) read from her new book, The Star Side of Bird Hill. The conversation was led by writer Tiphanie Yanique (right, top). "The Star Side of Bird Hill tells the story of two sisters from Brooklyn suddenly sent to Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. Kirkus Reviews calls Star Side "engrossing and poignant" while Publishers Weekly says that "readers will be turning the pages to follow Phaedra and Dionne's memorable journey."" -Penguin Press Literati in attendance included Bridget Davis, Tayari Jones, Brook Stephenson, Ayana Mathis, Clarence V. Reynolds, Penina Roth, Ed Toney, Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Jacqueline Johnson, Lauren Cerand, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Nina Angela Mercer, LaShonda Katrice Barnett, Daniel Jose and others. In 2007, Naomi interviewed Chimamanda Adichie for Mosaic.

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Naomi Jackson and Tiphanie Yanique at Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

LaShonda Katrice Barnett, Tayari Jones, Lauren Cerand, and Kamilah Aisha Moon

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Continued from page 35

“Nope.”

nist. “I’m looking to see who you got backing you up.” “Where you live?” “What?” “Forget it,” Lorenzo replied.

Lorenzo shrugged. No use giving him too much information.

The brief exchange provided Thug No. 2 an opportunity to go for the box. Lorenzo turned and slapped at him. The box slipped from the thug’s hand, hit the ground, and overturned. Cufflinks scattered in the gravel and rolled into the grass.

“You box?”

Across the street, one of Goode’s men flicked his Zippo and leaned in to light his boss’s cigar. But Goode stayed his hand. The man followed Goode’s line of vision. “Damn,” he said.

“Nope.”

In the park, Thug No. 2 knelt on the ground, bawling. His arm was bent crazily and he was spitting blood. Thug No. 1 was sprawled on his back, pinned to the ground by a large boot, not yet a size 14 EEE, planted on his chest. Satisfied that his tormentors could no longer bother him, Lorenzo turned his back on them and began to collect his cuff links, dust them off, and place them back in the box.

“Don’t know,” Lorenzo said. “Never had to do it before.”

Lorenzo shook his head. “Wrestle?”

“That was an impressive demonstration you put on over there. Where you’d learn to do that?”

“You need a job?” “Depends.” “On what?” “What I’d have to do and how much it pays.”

“Damn is right,” Goode said. “Bring that young man to me.” Minutes later, Lorenzo found himself being interviewed by a very important-looking man. He had on a tailormade pinstripe suit and leather boots spit-shined to a dazzling gleam. A half-chewed cigar dangled from his mouth. “Where you from, young’un?”

Goode smiled and gestured to his man. The man leaned in and lit Goode’s cigar. “What’s your name?” “Lorenzo.” “We could use someone like you, Lorenzo. You’ve got guts.” ★

“Right here.” “That so? I had you pegged for a Southern boy.”

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Excepted from Only the Strong by Jabari Asim. Used with the permission of Agate Publishing.

Thank you for your life.

Photo credit: Marcia E. Wilson/Widevision Photography

Brook Stephenson 1974-2015

Instagram.com/brooklife â&#x2122;Ľ brookstephenson.com

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¡PRESENTE! THE YOUNG LORDS IN NEW YORK July 2 to October 18, 2015 Organized by guest curators Johanna Fernández and Yasmín Ramírez, ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York is the ﬁrst museum survey to examine the radical social group founded by Puerto Rican youth in New York and Chicago in the 1960s. The Young Lords’ impactful political activities, communityfocused initiatives, and spirited afﬁrmation of Puerto Rican identity inspired both a generation of artists active during this era and artists working today. Also on view Bronx Calling: The Third AIM Biennial features the work of seventy-two emerging artists engaged in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Program (classes of 2014 and 2015).

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1040 Grand Concourse at 165th St Bronx NY 10463 | BronxMuseum.org | 718-681-6000