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Two Versions, One Spirit
Do you think it’s weird to feel like you haven’t really changed since you were a child? I’m not talking about maturity or life experience. I’m talking about your core personality. Honestly, I still feel like the same person I was as a kid. I’m still questioning everything and everyone. I still find the silliest…
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Zina Garrison: The Trailblazer Who Helped Change Tennis
When people talk about the history of Black women in tennis, the conversation often begins with Althea Gibson and then leaps straight to Venus and Serena Williams. But between those eras stood a remarkable athlete whose contributions deserve far more recognition: Zina Garrison. Born in Houston, Texas, November 16, 1963, Garrison fell in love with…
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Losing My Brother: A Soliloquy
November — He was missing. Missing is a strange word. It sounds temporary. Like misplaced keys. Like a sock behind the dryer. It suggests retrieval. Resolution. But this was different. Received a call telling me that he was missing. Sending my son to the police station to file a missing person report. Asking friends on…
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Surviving My Brothers
Grief keeps its own calendar. February comes in like a quiet thief, soft-footed and merciless, carrying dates that glow like coals. My brother Randy — gone on his birthday February 7th, just thirty-four, the candles never meant to be memorial lights. Four days earlier I was in a hospital bed with a broken leg, my…
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Fabulous Me
In May, it will be twenty years since I graduated from college. Me—the high school dropout they quietly counted out. Me—the mother of two children by the age of twenty-one. Me—the welfare recipient society loves to reduce to a statistic. And also me—the college student who walked across that stage with a 3.8 GPA, a…
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Sole Survivor
Six years next month. Six quiet, thunderous years of carrying a title no one applies for. A sole survivor is the last remaining member of their immediate family—the final branch on a once-leafy tree. My mother gave birth to three children. I am the only one left. No siblings to call and say, “Do you…
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It’s Okay to Cry
Forty-seven years ago, my mother had just gotten out of the hospital. She had been diagnosed with diabetes, and if my cousin Cleo hadn’t taken her in when she did, she would have slipped into a diabetic coma and died. That’s the part that still makes my chest tighten, even now. While she was hospitalized,…
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Black Walnut Ice Cream
The weirdest things can unlock childhood memories. Yesterday, a friend mentioned how his mother used to eat black walnut ice cream, and suddenly a whole flood of memories came rushing back to me—uninvited, vivid, and sweet in that bittersweet way only the past knows how to be. Memory is funny like that. It doesn’t knock.…
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Scrambled Eggs, Lightly Dusted
I’ve been watching MeTv Toons for over a year and whenever I hear the familiar voices of Magilla Gorilla, Woody Woodpecker, and so many others, I’m taken aback to living at 7246 South University back in the seventies. I am a little girl again. It’s Saturday morning and I’m nagging my mother to make me…
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The Potty Mouth Granny 