What I love most about On Morrison by Namwali Serpell is Serpell’s adoration, which I share, of how unapologetically difficult Toni Morrison was. I feel like whenever someone calls a woman a bitch or some other mean thing, it has to do with the fact that she refuses to be what others want her to be. A difficult woman in America is considered treasonous and unpatriotic. A difficult Black woman who is also storied and empowered and free is something else entirely.

I want to say this is the foundation of my personal obsession with Toni Morrison, steeped in profound respect for the courage it takes to ardently, consistently insist on the dignity of choosing to be difficult in this world that tells you you have no choice but to comply with others’ impression or estimations of you - or lack thereof. (Somewhat related but kind of not: I’m more than a year late reading Ava DuVernay on Audra McDonald and the power of quiet excellence, but if you haven’t read it, don’t wait.)

I had the privilege of reading On Morrison alongside Dana A. Williams’ Toni at Random, which I haven’t finished because I keep getting distracted by other books. And I really wanted to live in a world where it would be possible for me to read the Language as Liberation, but I made an arbitrary and practical (also maybe silly) rule to not buy another book on Toni until I finished the ones I’ve already got. And also to finish this mammoth Baldwin biography which I hope will be true by the end of this summer. In the midst of this was a beautiful and spot on review of On Morrison by the god MC Wesley Morris, one of the only good reasons left to subscribe to the New York Times.

Then there was a stupid comment from some white man (isn’t there always) dismissing our worship of Toni and her art, saying we’ve made her into a saint. By the way, she’s Catholic and so am I 68% of the time and we like the saints but we don’t want to be them; we want to be writers who are widely read and cherished for our work, which is what On Morrison demonstrates and delves into to a delicious degree.

More about this book, then.

I learned so much about language and the art of reading deeply by the way Serpell delves into Toni’s oeuvre, and I thought I already knew quite a bit. The themes and repetitions from Toni across work, the relationships of characters to one another and to her life, the absences of literary clues, like the absence of race in her celebrated short story, “Recitif” illuminates her difficulty on a whole other level.

Her thorough reading of the fucked up pieces of The Bluest Eye - I missed the Lolita stuff or if I saw it, I forgot about it — and also, speaking of reading, the humor Toni had, the way she read others for filth and occasionally, in self-critique, read herself. It was amazing to read about the origins of some of Toni’s ideas, how they lingered and haunted her work across time. I didn’t catch a third of what Serpell points out, but what a joy that is, because I can go back one day, if I’m lucky, to see what she was talking about for myself.

The only word that comes to mind is sublime; that was the way I felt reading On Morrison - like my brain was devouring a delicious snack. It’s now a core memory and milestone in my reading life.

It’s hard to describe what I love most about Jesamyn Ward’s work, but if I had to say what makes it feel healing to read in one word, it would be heart. I love that her new book, On Witness and Respair leaves us with respair, this uncommon word, that reads like breathing. I love that to read the title is to find that it means fresh hope after despair.

But of course, there is more. Ward is a daughter of Mississippi, an emblematic Southern state she describes with precision in the essay, “My True South” :

Mississippi is the memory America invokes whenever it wants to convince itself that racial violence and subjugation are mostly lodged in the past, that they have no space in our present moment, save in this backwoods, backward place.

Fresh on the heels of attacks on the American South as a renewed/ongoing political battleground — first, targeted attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center, then gutting the Voting Rights Act which will surely transform Southern districts significantly ahead of midterms — how could anyone point to one place as the distant owner of most American racism?

On Witness and Respair is a resonant and heartfelt collection of essays that thrums with hope, but also grief, dismay, and yes, despair. Ward is the mother to a black son in an America that wantonly murders black boys and girls and somehow blames these children for their deaths. She is the sister of a black man murdered by a drunk driver whose punishment did not fit the crime. She is the widow of a black man snuffed out by COVID.

Ward writes of speaking at her brother’s funeral:

I can only remember one line from my elegy. Nothing about the line is original; I have since read it in other books. There is a common truth in its message, a hopeful refrain for those who remain…

He taught me love is stronger than death.

So, back to what I mentioned above about Ward’s heart. Her essays are fueled by the personal and global pandemics of our time, which act as the currents that pull a reader through On Witness and Respair, remembering the hope of our youth and seeing evidence, all around us, that it may never come back, so we have to find ways to cultivate new hope whenever we can. Love is how Ward cultivates her hope, and you see that love in the sweet detail she uses to describe her kinfolk. In “Head Rush,” an essay about how her father’s admiration for Prince inspired him, she writes:

…With the demands of a family, my father couldn’t afford to spend much time in kung fu classes or drawing. He channeled his creativity into what he wore, instead…His jackets were riveted with silver studs; it was at though someone threw a handful of coins at him and they stuck.

Ward and I share a mutual affection for Ntozake Shange, and we have both had a similar encounter with the beloved author of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Ward writes that she found the famous choreopoem when she needed it, as did I. “My need was amorphous, inarticulate; I was a voracious reader as a teenager. In my free hours, at lunch and study hall, I wandered my small high school library’s stacks and I picked up book after book, inhaling a title a day.”

Our stories diverge in what we did with our admiration; in my case, I channeled it into directing a staging of the play at my mostly-white boarding school. In sharing her vulnerability, Ward offers room for others to do the same. This is true in her thoughtful profiles of Regina King and Ta-Nehisi Coates. In her profile, “The Beautiful Power of Ta-Nehisi Coates,” she writes:

Later in the conversation, he asks me if I miss my characters as he misses his; I respond by talking about writing rough drafts and revising and get lost in a terrible tangent. I never answer his question. Days later, I realize that’s okay, because we’ve had the best kind of conversation: we two cousins meeting for the first time, we two writers in the good fight meeting on furlough, trading dreams, possibilities, people. Garnering strength to return to battle, to tell these essential stories.

But one of the most memorable passages in this collection for me comes at the end of this collection, in “You Tell Your Story: You Survive.”

When I settled on the title for Salvage the Bones, one of the reasons I was so invested in using the word salvage is because it is so close, phonetically, to the word savage. At home, young people in my community have redefined the word, have stripped it of its racist meaning and, instead, recast it. They call themselves savages, and in doing so, declare that they are resilient. They call themselves savages and declare they are resourceful. They call themselves savages and declare that they have the courage necessary to fight the systems that seek to devalue them, and not only will they survive, they will thrive in spite of it.

I highlighted these passages in the galley, and then in the final copy, because I loved reading them so much. Because I appreciate the combination of beauty and power and fight and heart in these pages and I wanted to keep returning to them again and again. I hope you will feel the same when you read On Witness and Respair.

I believe that poets are the best of us, and I don’t know exactly why I believe that. It’s probably not important, but I do want to point it out. I will forever commemorate National Poetry Month in April for this reason, because if poets are not worth celebrating, nobody is.

I’m sure that my first introduction to writing involved black women poets, beginning with Maya Angelou and Jessica Care Moore and Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, leading to Nikki Giovanni and aja monet and Ntozake Shange and Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton. There was and has always been a very long list of poets to admire, I feel like their names are on repeat in my head.

But in general, there’s something very honest about a beautiful writer with the discipline not to shoehorn every emotion and thought into their work at all times. I like people that tell me the truth in as few words as possible, even though I’m long winded. It doesn’t make any logical sense.

Weird segue but this reminds me of when I first encountered Camonghne Felix and her voice, in her unique memoir, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation. I reviewed it in 2023 for The Boston Globe, but that review is behind a paywall, so I’ll spare you the irritation. That book used the framework of Felix’s learning disorder diagnosis, childhood trauma and difficulty with math as a lens to help us understand her challenges with and in relationships. The title itself taught me something and then there was inside the book. I did not know that heartbreak or a certain kind of grieving could make you lose aspects of your mind responsible for language or calculation. That there was a brokenness that changed you physically. But of course there is, that is what trauma is, what mental illness does. The overload of too much to bear and your heart and brain conspiring to say Enough Already.

I felt like Felix was kin but I didn’t know why after I read that first memoir. Then I started reading Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom, and the parallels jumped out. We are, both of us, Bronx girls. We have both been political speechwriters. She crossed paths with a toxic progressive and well-known white woman who gas lit her in the same way the very same woman whose name is not even important gas lit me — declaring that she wanted me to succeed in one breath, then in the next, offering me the same racist derision that can only come from a certain kind of white person who is also anti-black and misogynist while posing as a feminist. It’s vague and also specific.

In being specific, poets and poetics connect us to the universal. “The language of the oppressor is alive. But so is the language of the oppressed,” Felix writes. Let The Poets Govern is electric with the language of both the oppressor and the oppressed. I think this is why the combination of memoir, history and found poems in legal text brought me peace. It was affirming and resonant to read Felix’s truthful observations that writing for political spectacle and theater can be damaging to the spirit, can make you feel like you are wasting the sanctity of words. I appreciated this truth: “Trump represents a turning tide, the rise of fascism in a world that was unprepared to resist it.”

In these exhausting, confusing, painful times, reading the truths of someone so similar to you, who has walked similar paths and survived the very same demons might seem like it could only compound our weariness. But what I loved most about Let The Poets Govern is that it reminded me that we can make beauty from these ashes, even if we can’t yet understand how that will be because we are in the midst of the fire.

Maybe this is always true, but we seem to live in a time that asks that we hold multiple traumatizing events at once. War in the headlines, now in the Middle East, or a different part of the Middle East, as a different kind of domestic war unfolds; an ongoing battle for clarity, affordability, for sanity, for civility. The lethal devastation of military occupation on a scale I do not know and cannot fathom is different from a war of words, but, in order to write about personal heartbreak, it’s important to acknowledge the larger context of tragedy at scale. It is not comforting and it is not good, but perhaps it is only human that we all understand what the loss or the threat of loss of someone we love feels like.

The searing pain of losing someone you love who also loves you is the heartbeat of Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ beautiful memoir, The Flower Bearers. Her dear friend and poet sister Kamilah Aisha Moon dies suddenly on the day she marries the author Salman Rushdie on another continent. The telling is crafted so that this neat description is, like heartache, harder to grasp, much like accepting the reality of a loved one’s absence — physical or otherwise.

Another element of Griffiths’ experience is her dissociative identity disorder, or DID, often the result of severe trauma in childhood. While she shares with Aisha that it is not as uncommon or rare as she originally thought, she is only able to mention it to her closest friend once. This registered to me as true and difficult, an admission that might seem small to anyone who has not had to manage mental illness (in themselves or in those they love) but to me, the daughter of a woman with multiple mental illnesses and manifestations of severe childhood trauma, it added a layer of grief to process in the lines of the book. Not a loss of self, per se, but the loss and absence of “normalcy” of a kind of being in the world that does not require intervention or monitoring for the hair triggers everywhere that make a complex life even more so.

Here is Griffiths sharing the wisdom of one of my favorite actresses, Regina King, whose son died by suicide: “I understand that grief is love that has no place to go.”

So, there is sadness and darkness in The Flower Bearers, but there is also light. There is the clarity of self-awareness, the love of community that is both deep and wide. There is also the healing nature of poetry itself.

“One of the texts I returned to often was June Jordan’s ‘The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America.’ There was a passage that I frequently revisited:

‘A poet writes in her own language. A poet writes of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home.’”

Griffiths is at home with her words and with her memories, and her readers are better for it. “For us, fear was a thief, disguised in almost everything but the sky, the sea, the air, and the trees that formed our world. Life was a site of grace.” As proof, she describes dancing with Aisha among other black poets, “All complexions, love in all directions was celestial. We flung ourselves skyward and seaward, recovering the language that had been waiting for us on the floors of oceans that spanned the earth.”

Here is wisdom her friend Aisha gave her: “…Do your work. Remember that the entire earth is our lane. Don’t let these small things become your world. Grow broader, bigger, better.”

The title of this pretty memoir refers to a dream Griffiths has.

“In my dream, there is a young girl, one of my inner selves, who tells me that she is a Flower Bearer. Her sweet voice is accusatory: You’ve been confusing the meaning. We’re not pallbearers or flower girls. We’re Flower Bearers. Do you ever give flowers to yourself?”

“I need to know what a Flower Bearer is. A quick search tells me that the origin of Flower Bearers is at least one hundred years old. Flower Bearers, who were at first very young girls, or relatives of the departed loved one, would often be called Flower Girls or Flower Bearers. Dressed usually in all white, they were more likely to be incorporated into Black funerals; it was uncommon to have them at white funerals…Somehow the familiar adage of ‘giving a person their flowers’ was the exact opposite of how the title and role was once intended. ‘Giving flowers’ to a person now means that a life is honored, recognized and praised, while that person is still alive to witness and receive their ‘flowers.’”

At Aisha’s grave with another friend, Griffiths says they talk for hours, including: “We speak with admiration of those young selves, also us, who used to fuel themselves with trouble. Young women who believed that they deserved more than what the world told them to accept, who refused to stop dancing, stop singing, stop writing.”

And this is the real gift of The Flower Bearers to readers who do not yet know Griffiths or Rushdie and will not know the shining person that is Kamilah Aisha Moon, now an ancestor. Griffiths gives her friend flowers, and offers them, also, to herself, so that we can bear witness, and pass it on.

Jarvis R. Givens’ I’ll Make Me A World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month gave me language to describe my interest in black history that was especially invigorating in a time when the black past is under threat of permanent erasure. When I am living my best nerd book life, I have a cup of something warm or ice cold to sip on, a multi-colored highlighter and/or a sharpened No. 2 pencil and a paper book to mark up like a toddler armed with crayons about to attack white walls with abandon. I did not read this book under these ideal conditions, but I still managed to highlight entire passages, and what took me so long writing this review is that I wanted to share the sections that meant the most to me.

The pages that spoke to me most included this passage about the most immediate precursor of Woodson’s Negro History Week, which was the annual celebration of Frederick Douglass Day, which began on February 14, 1897. Because someone else was, of course, first given credit for the creation of commemorating Frederick Douglass’ chosen birthday, I already knew it was something a black woman did. In fact, Douglass Day was the vision of the retired educator and activist March Church Terrell, who wrote to a newspaper that got it wrong, likely in 1924, to say that she and she alone established the annual celebration in D.C. public schools just two years after Douglass died.

She wrote, “With the exception of the trustees who voted for it, no human being dead or alive had anything whatsoever to do with establishing Douglass Day in the Colored Schools but myself…I have done very few things of which I am proud, but I am proud of the fact that it was entirely through my suggestion and motion that the trustees voted to set aside a portion of the afternoon of Feb. 14th in which to honor the memory of one of the greatest men this country have ever produced.”

You better say that, Mrs. Terrell.

I loved that Givens employed “the language of ‘black memory work’ and ‘black memory workers’ as capacious terms borrowed from black women archivists to describe the enterprise of recovering, preserving, and bearing witness to black history.”

Then, he went on:

“Recognizing the severe limitations of dominant historical knowledge, African Americans created what the late historian Charles H. Wesley called a ‘heroic tradition’ of remembering history: They insisted on giving a black account of the past, even when their interpretations, additions and reconstructions of critical historical details about the past conflicted with those of people in power; even when such knowledge of the past was deemed seditious by white Americans. Again, I trace this heroic tradition back to the writings of fugitive slaves, runaway captives who chose physical escape from bondage and who also found ways to escape into their mind. For indeed, stealing one’s own mind has always been the first step in the African American plot for freedom.”

Also:

“…there was and continues to be a distinctive intimacy between death and black memory work in African American social life. African Americans’ pursuit of knowledge about the black past, as a foundation of liberatory education, is inextricably linked to their struggles to attend to and acknowledge their dead. It’s not just about listing their names among those who have passed on but about giving an account of the substance of their lives and asserting their value in a world that has perpetually condemned black people both in life and death. Researching, studying and commemorating black history, for African Americans, became a ceremony of the living to honor and remember the deceased — to insist that black people’s lives were valuable and that those lives had been filled with lessons and knowledge, as well as beauty and hard truths about the world.”

There is a lot of valuable, energizing work here about the value of black historical knowledge as a catalyst for social change. I will say that I sometimes personally feel like it is almost a frivolous indulgence to spend time thinking about the black past, about how our ancestors navigated lynching and the terrors of Reconstruction, the paradoxes of the civil rights movement and other liberation struggles while also managing to find the energy, resources and time to love one another, to raise families to pursue their passions. There is so much in the present to wrestle with for those of us who hope for a better future. But I’ll Make Me A World is a powerful and timely reminder that there are few more significant ways for us to gather the strength and power we need for the many ongoing battles of today than looking at a long tradition of black memory work in the face of persistent, eternal forgetting and dismissal. Here’s to another century of black memory work, of giving our children and our grandchildren more of everything beautiful to remember.

I have been a fan of Tayari Jones for so long that I don’t even remember how I came to appreciate her work, but it started before An American Marriage. (Check out this piece I wrote about An American Marriage and Their Eyes Were Watching God for The Millions back in 2018.) The same candor and cinematic writing that made me fall in love with Roy and Celestial in An American Marriage has sharpened and matured in the pages of Kin.

Annie and Vernice, or Niecy, are “cradle friends” from the same small town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Not only are they from the same place, they are also both motherless Black girls. Sometimes our destiny is shaped by facts like this more than where we were reared on a map.

Their lives move in different directions, as is wont to happen. Annie is so fixated on finding her mother, Hattie Lee, that she stays closer to their home than Niecy, who makes her way to the esteemed, storied Spelman College. All the while, she carries the “tender bruise” of her mother’s absence in a way that is more tangible than how Niecy does.

Other girls at Spelman might be working on their “MRS. Degrees,” hopefully to be bestowed upon them by the good brothers at Morehouse across the street, but at least initially, Niecy is on another journey. Her roommate, Joette, is wealthy and snobby from the beginning, dubbing her a Country Mouse. “Aunt Irene had a name for girls like Joette: ‘soft foot.’ These were women whose life unfolded in such a way that their feet stayed as soft as their hands, and their hands stayed as soft as their feet.” Well, Joette’s feet and hands aren’t her only softness, as it turns out, and her bond with Niecy deepens in a way that both rivals and threatens her connection to Annie.

The epistolary correspondence between friends is brilliant because it shows (rather than tells) how knowing someone since you were babies doesn’t mean you feel that you can show them all of you. Maybe not because you don’t trust them to love you in spite of, but because you can’t trust yourself to be OK being seen. So Niecy is figuring herself out — her mother wound shows up in the way that she struggles to find reliable elders to listen to, because she tries not to really listen to her own self.

Meanwhile, Annie steals away to find Hattie Lee. On this impossible, unpredictable journey, she finds a group of folks who are more like her family than her biological relatives. Kinfolk. More than the fact that some of these folks are country, a little loose, sometimes broken, there are intricate class dynamics. I especially love this line: “Was there anyone in this world too poor to be free?”

There is also at the center of the novel the question of many different kinds of love. Romantic love is the heartbeat of Kin, especially unrequited love that is pushed aside in response to one of the many unspoken rules of the politics of respectability. “An ‘I love you’ that is out in the world unanswered bedevils a space, like the ghost of a whore in Mississippi.”

Even if her heart is elsewhere, especially so, maybe because he can sense her light is dimming, Niecy’s husband tells her what his father has warned him about: “Your wife brings the light to your life. If you put out that flame, the two of you end up just sitting in the dark.”

The torment that comes with searching for what you believe you will never find, and the impact that has on the ones who love you is also a central feature of Kin. Maybe because when you have to mourn a person or an idea, you find out who really loves you, and that is your true family, blood relation or no. I won’t have you out here telling people I spoiled the novel for you, so let me just say that Annie believes something that turns out not to be true about Hattie Lee, and her boyfriend, Bobo, tries to understand. “Baby, that sorrow had been weighing on your since I first laid eyes on you. When a girl is a little stormy, a man like me wants to follow behind you with an open umbrella. But I am exhausted now, and wet.” You can probably guess what happened with Bobo and his little umbrella.

And on that note, not all in Kin is heavy. I would argue that the beauty of the dialogue that gets right to the heart of a thing is its own levity. But the pure Southern, charming wit is here, too. What is always true about our kinfolk is that even when, maybe especially when, we are sad or in pain, a joke better than what any comedian can spin lifts the whole room. On Niecy’s wedding day, she and Annie have an exchange when Annie asks her cradle friend if she is really in love. Niecy plays dumb, says something like, I don’t know what you mean and Annie says, “Vernice, I can’t believe that you would lie to my face after I paid all this money for an ugly dress, and had that wig on my head, looking like the girl that got cut from the Supremes.”

I love a book that makes me laugh outloud, especially in times like this, when it is difficult to find a chuckle that isn’t tinged with grief. It was real medicine to visit with the characters in Kin, to be reminded of what it feels like to be with Black women at home with themselves and with each other.

Before I get started I wanted to share the most inspiring thing I read in the past week about a book club at Rikers called the Rosebuds Reading Collective. You can donate to the club here; I haven’t clicked on something so fast in a long time.

“Consider what it means to bloom as plants do: to emerge from a dark, cramped space but with the knowledge that you have all the material you need to perform as you were intended to.”

I love the part of books that both show and tell what they are about. This quote comes from late in Bloom How You Must: A Black Woman’s Guide to Self-Care and Generational Healing, but it resonated with me because I love flowers. I love them so much I have a regular spiritual practice of buying myself roses. The world is chaotic and it’s icy everywhere so I skip some weeks, but there are covers like this that help. Everything about this book reset my frayed nervous system, like a spa day for my brain. And remembering that we have so much to learn from flowers — and nature — is a blessed reminder.

I also appreciated being reminded that the reason I have a hard time resting and caring for myself is not for lack of trying or effort, but because, in Jefferson’s words, “Ease is the most radical concept I can think of. Going back generations, the women in my family only know hard work, of showing up even when you’re dog tired. There is always something else to do. The to-do list is never ending because it goes back to what your mama and her mama couldn’t get to.”

In Bloom How You Must, Jefferson has curated/collected the wisdom of more than one hundred Black women she calls the Gardeners, who represent every season of our lives and tell about what has worked for them. Reading it is a beautiful experience, and for me, it felt especially healing to be affirmed by elders, since I only have a few in my orbit to dispatch their experience in small doses. Every time I picked this book up, I felt a little better, and a little more seen.

Take, for instance, this passage about the impact of racism over the generations on how Black folks connect (or fail to) with nature. “…growing up as the descendants of enslaved people and farmers and sharecroppers shifts the way we engage with nature. Nature was a job, not an adventure. And even if we did want to explore the outdoors and revel in its splendor, it would do us good to remember the nasty realities of Jim Crow — until the 1950s, national and local parks were segregated, and public pools were off-limits as a rule of law.”

No wonder we can’t find ease in places where it is supposed to be easy to relax. The history of excluding us even in places that are allegedly free is not only the recent past, but it makes these places the sites of generational trauma. Read enough history and/or live through enough of it, and it feels like there are no freedom places.

Maybe I am just exhausted by the world, and that’s not the only way to look at it.

Another perspective is that everywhere is ours, beginning with ourselves. Still other perspectives are written in the beautiful, enduring spirit of Bloom How You Must: writers, scholars, historians, witnesses and gardeners who can help us reclaim space wherever we decide to risk blooming. Bloom How You Must is a love letter to share with yourself and those you know could use the reminder.

Happy New Year, y’all. It’s intense in the news cycle, and in the world, but as usual I am finding sanctuary in books. I hope you are making time to do that, too. Just a note of deep gratitude to you for subscribing in a time of severe American dysfunction and despair and pain. There’s so much to look at and pay attention to — I value your time and attention. I hope you find this space replenishing. For new subscribers, welcome! I’m a quality over quantity person with reviews, for a lot of reasons, so my publishing schedule is irregular. I include affiliate links to my Bookshop store to help pay for my book addiction. It is my intention to keep this newsletter free, so if you shop for books here, you also help support that intention.

I finished listening to The Waterbearers late last year, after I saw the book long listed for an award. A writer I love also mentioned it, probably Imani Perry. And then it kept popping up. The tone and the approach to the subject, very relevant to my life and interests, resonated so deeply that I ordered a hard copy. I mention this because it is notable for someone with basically no shelf space to be out here buying hardcovers, but sometimes a book’s beauty warrants illogical moves.

Let’s start with the physical cover that you shouldn’t judge the book by, but it’s a good starting place. It is imprinted with waves, maybe of a river or a tributary, which I didn’t notice until the physical copy arrived. So much of my attention goes to what is digital that it feels nice to feel the imprint of water on a book.

The contents are the author’s tribute to the way the mamas and grandmothers in her life, and the famous ones we know, too, move in the world. The Waterbearers is a testimony about what it is to find a physical home, in this case a Houston house known as 50 10, and what it is to find spiritual home in the women who raised you up.

Ms. Bonet’s grandmother Betty Jean calls to mind my own paternal grandmother Betty — and a simple two-syllable name tells you so much about a person, the era in which they had to endure, what kind of life they must have had trying to maintain their dignity and stay alive as Black women raising Black girls and boys. I mean, the world as it is right now is pretty damn horrible, but what they had to navigate was another level of hell, I’m sure. Not to get all oppression Olympics on y’all, it’s just important to remember the context of American history, how long the horrors have been happening.

What I love most about the fact of The Waterbearers is that it complicates the traditional portrayals of Black mothers in literature and popular culture. We are known and remembered for enduring the unacceptable; for strength but not sexiness, for powerlessness, not the strategic use of our uncanny intuition and other gifts. I also appreciate the book’s affirmation that as violent as America has been with us and to us, we are entitled to our softness. We do not have to harden, to freeze or to take flight — we can, and we do, still just flow.

The Waterbearers is about the legacy of the tributaries in Bonet’s bloodline and the better known like Recy Taylor and Betty Davis and Iberia Hampton. Getting the physical book reminded me of the eternal stunning effect of Lorna Simpson’s photograph, “Waterbearer,” featuring a black woman in a simple white sleeveless dress, facing the void, her hands holding a jug and a pitcher and emptying them out. Accompanied by th words: “She saw him disappear by the river. They asked her to tell what happened, only to discount her memory.”

The Waterbearers taught me about tributaries, which are networks of smaller streams that when they combine increase the flow and force of a river as a collective. When I think about Black women and water, I often think of a Toni Morrison quote about how water always remembers where it comes from, so it was nice to read Morrison’s wisdom in the form of one of the epigraphs: “If you don’t understand the history of African American women, you don’t understand the history of America.” So deep, so resonant, especially right now.

Throughout the text, there is code-switching, more depth and truth, poetically rendered: “Their intimacy was forged in reminding each other of home despite their insistence on forgetting. They never spoke of the past, but their calloused hands and the cadence of their breath told the stories they had laid to rest inside themselves.”

Or, “The shape of freedom, like the shape of water, is difficult to define as it is ever shifting but so elemental that it can’t be mistaken. It is understood that water takes on the shape of its surroundings, but if you stay a while, observe a little longer, you’ll notice its patience.” And one more — “Everyone around me that had power had given birth.”

I think reading this book reminded me that we all carry the stories of the women who came before us in our bones. That some of those stories are shaped and stained by violence, but not all. That part of our legacy is not only about what has been done to us but also what we will choose for ourselves, so that our daughters can have, and make, better choices, too.

I love the wisdom of The Waterbearers, how reading it feels like sitting on somebody’s porch with a glass of sun tea and a church fan. There are also parts of the motherhood journey that are just ignorant and messy. That’s here, too, but somehow told with elegance, without judgment. I love books because sometimes when you are reading them, they are also reading you. How could I, how could any of us ever forget — “I was raised to believe that each of us is the sum of our grandmothers’ prayers”?

I was theorizing my experience as an expectant mother, and when I’m in analysis mode over something I have no idea about, I read. I found some solace in reading Dani McClain’s We Live for the We. I resonated with the familial love so deeply entrenched in every word of Bridgett M. Davis’ Love, Rita, but that’s also my big sister’s name, so I spent a lot of the book trying not to think of losing her, trying to pull apart my own grief to make room for the joy of being a new mom.

And then I felt so obsessed with baby things that it was nice to try and read other topics. I devoured Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which was memorable and easy. I also deeply enjoyed Tre Johnson’s Black Genius: An American Legacy essay collection. I am thinking these days about my personal legacy and the collective one, in a new way. There is something really powerful about being reminded of how your people manage to thrive in the midst of cycles of oppression and suppression. We sure can make a praise dance go down even as the dirge tries to drag us down.

I felt alive and ready to rejoice reading through Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ Misbehaving at the Crossroads. It felt like sitting down with my aunties and hearing them tell about how they got over. Speaking of auntie vibes, Matriarch both tickled and inspired me.

I read Great Black Hope, which I heard so many great things about, but ultimately, I felt a little cheated out of a plot by otherwise amazing sentences and some interesting characters. There were a few books I felt this way about, where there were passages of great beauty but the whole left me wanting for something different. For example, I deeply enjoyed a lot of The Wilderness, but I lost my way in the movement back and forth through time, and with a sharp detour into a different kind of story at the end. It was still nourishing to read a novel centered on four Black friends navigating contemporary life. Every generation deserves to see themselves and read their stories.

Some lives and their trajectories come along less frequently than once in a generation. Such is the story of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Her memoir, Lovely One, was the balm I needed as the U.S. continues to be under constitutional and moral assault.

I just listened to Sasha Bonét’s beautiful book, The Waterbearers and ordered a print copy just so I can revisit the beautiful sentences and highlight my little heart out. I don’t understand why the book hasn’t gotten more attention, but do yourself a favor and read a copy for yourself — it is stunning. I’ve started reading John Edgar Wideman’s Languages of Home, a collection of his cross-genre writing. I became a forever fan of Wideman when I read his resonant Op-Ed fifteen years ago, “A Seat Not Taken” (gift link) about how nobody wants to sit next to a Black person on the Amtrak. I am making my way through the difficult but necessary book, Tell Her Story, about how our elder Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered by police in her home in 1984. Nicholas Boggs’ biography of James Baldwin, Baldwin: A Love Story, is a masterpiece.

I’m so looking forward to what 2026 will bring, including Tayari Jones’ Kin, Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ memoir, The Flower Bearers and I’ll Make Me A World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month by Jarvis Givens. I’d love to hear what your year in reading looked like, and what you’re looking forward to in the coming months.

“Without self-love, there is no matriarch.”

This is one of the many powerful sentiments in Matriarch, which I listened to all summer while I was learning how to care for my little one and myself in sweltering heat under the reign of an authoritarian regime. Sometimes, the phrase self-love feels like a cliche, and other times, it feels like a life raft — but maybe this is just life. Either way, like so much else in my life, I had to teach myself to nurture myself as a child, and now find myself re-mothering myself. I turned to Matriarch for the wisdom I knew I would find to supplement the guidance of the mothers in my own family, living and on the other side.

One of my main takeaways from listening to Matriarch is that America does not exist without Black mothers. Not just the infrastructure and architecture of the place, but every good, soulful thing about this country has been created or nurtured by Black womanhood and our capacity for creativity. I know this and have always known it, but it’s another thing to affirm now. Whether that has meant mothering white children or the luxury of mothering our own; our elders and ancestors have always known this and respected it. (I’m listening now to Sasha Bonet’s beautifully insightful book, The Waterbearers and she also writes tenderly about the special place in our culture for grandmothers, and why we rightfully revere them so.)

I was drawn to Ms. Tina’s memoir for a lot of reasons: I’ve been a fan of Beyoncé’s for a very long time; I have always been curious about the Knowles family in their own words — particularly the creative confidence and sovereignty of Solange — and I am an especially big fan of Black women’s stories as we tell them. In times of transition, of national crisis or personal healing, I will always seek out Black women telling our stories. We know best how to heal the place we built and the people in it that we nurture above and beyond ourselves, for better or worse.

I will also admit to having a bit of an obsession with the word matriarch, which strikes me as a word for Black women that has been in need of reclamation and reaffirmation for many years now. I first remember hearing matriarch in connection to Black women as a kind of slur and in connection with the Moynihan report, as if Black women alone were to blame for the societal and political forces that have made us the heads of our households, left to raise families most of the time by ourselves. Matriarch also means a powerful woman in a family or an organization, so not just mothers. Besides, whether you have children or not, the strength of matrilineal ways of being in the Black community as a counterforce for state destruction of the Black family has always struck me as the truth.

Ms. Tina’s story is Southern in the way that Galveston and Houston and the Gulf Coast are Southern. All her kin knew that she was going to be a bad ass, that her whole line of people were bad asses, which means that yes, Beyonce knew since she was a baby, pretty much, who she would become. Matriarch is the glorious backstory of the woman responsible for iconic shapers of not just modern Black music and creativity but reshapers of popular culture to insert the multitudes of Black womanhood.

I came to listen to Ms. Tina tell that story, and she did not disappoint. But there was more, about the push and pull of caring for self while trying to keep a broken marriage whole, about a woman’s ambition for herself and her children and her family and how those pieces are sometimes scattered about and take years to collect. Everything she tells about Matthew sounds true, and at the end of the book, I feel like I knew him without knowing him. I remembered the innate fortitude and faith my mother had when she was physically alive, and how that is my inheritance; it was as a little girl and now it is mine, as the matriarch in my family now.

“Why do they think just because I’m Black I’m going to steal from them?” I asked while helping her to prepare dinner at her house one Sunday.

“Oh, honey, those people have nothing to do with your life,” Grandma said, wiping her hands on her apron before reaching for mine. “You are meant for greater things than they will ever imagine, so don’t let them trouble your heart.”

My mother, too, had expressed this sentiment, though in her own way. “Guard your spirit, Ketanji,” she would say whenever I seemed to be unsettled by the inequities of the world. “To dwell on the unfairness of life is to be devoured by it.”

And so, with these matriarchs’ beloved voices forever in my ear, I rejected self-doubt and self-loathing. Instead, I chose possibility. I chose purpose. And I embraced all the places in my life where I could dwell in the light.

Dwell in the light. What a revolutionary premise in a time of darkness.

It’s tough for me to look away from the headlines or my own life for long enough to finish anything that isn’t streaming on TV. But it does feel good for my soul, which is really the soul of a reader, to remember history, to look closely at lives lived well and with excellence as a comforting reminder of what is possible. It’s good to be reminded in a time when choices and freedoms are being snatched away that people like Justice Jackson have defied odds with humility, grace and the love of her village.

One of my favorite things about Lovely One is that it shows a life shaped by both of the challenges and gifts of the times, these aspects that we all face in our own way, and how those qualities led a passionate, hardworking judge to a path that even she had not dared to dream with too many aloud. Over and over in these pages, I was taken by how persistently her future husband Patrick and later, her daughters, believed fervently in her ability to change history with the fact of her talents, and how much she wanted to claim faith in those abilities as loud as their collective support.

I used to be focused on reading books right after their releases, but that season of my life is now over. I also believe books find us just when we most need the messages and reassurance we can find within them. In these days of governing as an act of cruel spectacle, weaponized especially against Black women, it has been particularly refreshing to read the testimony of one who so loves the rule of law and is committed to defending the Constitution. Jackson wrote in 2019, “‘The primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,’ I wrote. ‘They do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.’”

It is unsurprising given the history of this country that this testimony and witness, of what the law and government really is for, who it is really for, was penned by not just a Black woman, but the first Black woman to be appointed to the highest court in the land. There is a ton of wisdom, humility, grace and gratitude in these pages, too. I was struck by the Justice’s thoughtfulness and protectiveness of her family, particularly her daughter Talia, who is autistic, in the pursuit of her dreams and ambitions. A mother’s love feels like the sky to me now and we want the clouds to keep out of the path of the sun. This way, even if we ourselves forget to dwell in the light — so easy to forget — one day it will be impossible from keeping our babies from basking in it.

That first time around, I was nowhere near close to being ready to have a baby. Also, back then, babies having babies — as our elders would say — bore the stigma and complications that Leila Mottley eloquently explores in her sophomore novel, The Girls Who Grew Big. Being a teenaged mother was a passport to a different life entirely.

Catholic as I was, crazed as my mother was, I knew being a young mother wasn’t a journey I could take without bitterness embedding itself in me for the rest of my life. I had seen how a complex range of emotions could take hold of the eyes of the young girls around me, in the set of their jaws. Especially the Black girls, who were already blamed for being fast and loose — here their babies were, living proof of the stereotype. Whether systems and practices in the world at large were stacked against us or not, any failures to live up to impossible standards, to bear loneliness or raising ourselves were also ours to own, to wear as scarlet letters.

So when I started reading The Girls Who Grew Big, I thought of what a relief of a book it would have been for me to read back then, to understand that there are communities of women, of people, who make the best decisions for their lives that they have in front of them. Those choices — which aren’t really choices, by the way — are then judged from the perspective of people who probably have many more options and privileges, as if everyone has the same set of opportunities before them. But then, you can choose whether you let the judgement live rent-free in your mind, or if you let it wash over you, down the drain of life.

There is a compassionate, sweet solidarity in Mottley’s book that soothed me even as an older mom who is very new at mothering. I feel this: “I was just a fragile thing in a sharp world, like every other girl is before they meet themselves, before they meet their child and know what it means to give.” Each of The Girls in the book is both soft and fiercely themselves, vulnerable but determined to provide themselves their own strengths.

I also feel this: “…I lived in the promise I’d made the moment I’d birthed them: to pull a world that was good to them from the depths of its horrors. I owed them the impossible.”

As complete and true as the complicated relationships of The Girls are to one another and to their loved ones, some of the resonant emotions in the book also felt sometimes removed from the depths of motherhood. I’m not sure if Mottley herself is a mother; the Acknowledgements section suggests that she may not be and that she relied heavily on the testimony of her beloved community. That I pose the question is a testament to how well she enters this world, particularly if she is not a parent. I’m particularly sensitive to lines like this, which reads to me the way writing does when someone admires another’s lived experience and might miss a few things.

For example: “Loneliness is a young mother’s shadowed hand, clutched to the gut and pulling even as she laughs with her babies, even as she bites off newborn fingernails and rubs lotion under the folds on an infant’s neck, it always has a hold.” Yes, there is a loneliness, true. But loneliness is a state of being that can be temporary and potentially fixed by the presence of others, by the community reflected in the novel. But what’s missing here is the sense of isolation, the truth of the systemic construction of being intentionally marginalized from pretty much every aspect of American life once you become a mother who is both romanticized and ostracized, invisible and hypervisible. It’s a lot to ask for one book to include all of these dimensions of motherhood, but the absence of some of these parts felt as sharp and real and enormous to me as the other blooming passages of The Girls Who Grew Big.

I am, however, always available for reminders of Black brilliance, and so I found myself eagerly poring through Tre Johnson’s edifying essay collection, Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy (on sale July 29th) whenever I had a chance.

Reading Black Genius had me in highlighter mode for a number of reasons. Johnson equates Black ingenuity and creativity with genius that is distinctly American in a way that is uncommonly, and beautifully immersed in joy. It is a frame that is not hooked on Black pain as the sole catalyst for Black self-determination or identification.

“We’re utterly amazing, yet Black folks are consistently, persistently, intentionally, conveniently, diabolically left out of conversations about genius all the time,” Johnson writes in the introduction. “That is why this book exists. I think America knows this but has repeatedly resisted our genius to the point of mutual destruction.”

From the details of his upbringing on Trenton, NJ to observations he’s picked up elsewhere, Johnson’s love for Black culture and Black people in the pages of Black Genius is on full display. You might expect that given the title, but sometimes the contents of books don’t live up to the promise of their titles.

I appreciated seeing a proper description of the airbrushed memorial t-shirt that emerges from every hood everywhere as an example of Black genius on par with the splendor of The Roots Picnic or Black Star the film festival alongside spontaneous outbursts of creativity that are sometimes read as disruptions to civil society. “The world is still set up for us to navigate and celebrate Blackness through a series of red lights and green lights, and those permissions and denials are the reasons we need to consider about why we sometimes do things like become flash mobs and urban ATV roadies.”

During a time of such upsetting retreat on all the things this country promised to improve in 2020, or even further back during civil rights gains in the 60s, remembering that our survival instincts have a longer timeline feels not only affirming, but essential. But too much of what I read focuses on what Black people can do to withstand assaults and changes, and not much on what white people can do — or avoid doing — to be better. Toward the end of the book, Johnson mentions something that I hadn’t seen named before, and as soon as I read it, I felt the joy of recognition combined with the sadness that it was so common and so true. He mentioned his annoyance at his white friends creating anti-racist book clubs as the most passive form of resistance. The very least they could do was sit around and read about how to be less racist — and it was possibly worse than doing nothing. I know so many folks like this; fewer, thankfully, than I used to, since the events of 2020 made me decide between their mental health and mine, so I chose me. But even then, I thought that even the mere performance of solidarity was at least somewhat comforting. Now, folks aren’t even acting like they’re on our side, and our ingenuity can help us survive — the question really is what will we have to use it to defend against next?

Miss Jeffers’ voice is an unapologetically Black Southern womanist voice, authentically and generously paying homage to African-American ancestral lineage, to Black women and to Black Southern culture, which is the foundation of American culture. The first time I heard her by reading her words, I knew that she loved Black people because of what she wrote and how she wrote it; the ferocity of her defense of us, because she would tell the truth, and then she would tell off the people who tried to come for her as soon as they did with more truth. If I’m being honest, I was a little afraid I might misstep, and I’m pretty sure I did when I forgot the accent in her first name during one of our early exchanges online — a mistake I would never make again.

So there is that gravitas, that energy like a whirlwind with language, that I love when I read her. But the honesty and beauty in Miss Jeffers’ voice that I admire most is that it sounds like home. Like fellowship. Reading her writing gives me the feeling of talking to my friends on the phone for hours that pass like minutes or talking mess across a kitchen table over a delicious meal: Manna. Though I have never met her in person and only rarely have heard her actual speaking voice, I was an early fan of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois — the most sweeping epic of Black life and legacy I have ever read and probably ever will.

For someone who has struggled to find and identify home, with just a handful of people I consider genuine friends and family, locating the comfort and peace in an author to whom I am not related is an uncommon experience. But I wonder if some of the ethereal magic of Miss Jeffers’ pen is that she makes everyone feel centered, like she is talking just to you.

Misbehaving at the Crossroads, scheduled to be published June 24th, is a treatise that combines memoir, poetry and essays in a way that hasn’t resonated with me since I found Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, the collection in which Miss Walker defines womanism, articulates a Black womanist creative sensibility and locates activism for Black women in our everyday lives unlike any other writer has ever done. Misbehaving at the Crossroads is certainly in the tradition of Miss Walker’s work, and as a collection, poetically continues the conversations Miss Walker started decades ago, bringing reflections on the ways Black women continue to navigate autonomy, community and resilience into the modern era.

I highlighted large swaths of my galley, because I found so much truth ringing in my ears that I wanted to be sure to capture it all. I can’t wedge it all in here, but I’ll start at the beginning, with this assertion from the perspective of January 6th apologists and their ilk: “Nobody BIPOC can be right, unless they agree that Whiteness is the logical conduit to moral and political authority in the United States.” I wish that attitude was older and less relevant than it is, but I still appreciate the clarity and insight, as much as I detest this truth.

In the essay that follows, “Our Fathers Who Rewrote Our Mothers,” I was fascinated to learn about the legal and social context of Black mothers during enslavement and how it carried forward into ongoing slander in the centuries to come. I’ll be giving birth to my first child soon, which I’ve been writing about, and so I was struck by seeing in Miss Jeffers’ pages a phrase that I’ve seen in other places: “Partus sequitur ventrem, which translates to ‘Offspring follows belly,’ a barnyard term, given to the breeding of horses and cows and pigs and dogs. This is how colonial White men viewed Black women: animals grunting and shitting in a field.”

I also learned how this damning status came to be applied to Black women in America, through the freedom quest of Elizabeth Key, whose mother was an enslaved Black woman and whose father was a free Anglo-Virginian. Ultimately, once she was forced to pay reparations for being enslaved (italics mine), Elizabeth got her freedom, but Virginia changed the law in 1662 to change the status of Black women’s children, so that they would “serve as the condition of the mother.” Put another way, “If the credit for founding this nation has been given to the White man, then the burden of slavery has been assigned to the Black woman. She was the inverse image of Eve, both mother and not mother, for her children didn’t belong to her.”

There’s much to unpack there, and Miss Jeffers does so, pointedly, with incisive critique. She charts a path from this brutal past through to her reflections on her family history, her status as a daughter to a hardworking, visionary mother and a predatory, abusive father; as a sister and granddaughter in the American South.

I’ve focused here on the heavier aspects of Misbehaving at the Crossroads, but there is levity and wit in the collection as there is wherever Miss Jeffers is using her voice. For instance, as triggering and annoying as Miss Jeffers’ descriptions are of her encounters with white peers in the writing world and in academia, they gave me life. There is a letter to the now-deceased white male poet who made an outrageous and crude sexual comment about her Southern accent that he should have been properly shamed for while he was alive, but karma being what it is, she at least has the last word. There’s an eviscerating “Imaginary Letter to the White Lady Professor Who Might Have Extended an Invitation to Read Poetry at Their Prestigious University” who has shown an “appalling lack of home training” on a lot of levels, including referring to Miss Jeffers by her first name, inviting her to their institution while also offering an honorarium that is “99.9 percent less than my asking fee” — an encounter that Black scholars the world over understand and will be able to relate to. (I highly suggest using this letter as a template for when you decline such invitations, because you should.)

I cannot explain the combination of embarrassment for Some People and deep glee for the Black women who give Those People grace I felt reading “Imaginary Letter to the White Lady Colleague Who Might Have Sat Next to Me at One of the Now Eliminated University Workshops for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training.” Let me tell you something — It is a work of beauty. I hope I don’t have to explain much about the inanity of experiencing DEI training when your whole life is a clinic in trying to get others to value DEI. That’s another story for another day.

Miss Jeffers captures the truly strange expectations that well-meaning white colleagues in academia (and others who do not mean well) have of the too-few Black peers they encounter, particularly for a performance of gratitude for just breathing the same air. I was tickled by it, sad as I am for every Black woman who is expected to do “academic housekeeping” while also carrying the loads we alone are required to carry.

In one of the more personal essays, Miss Jeffers writes this, at the end: “Here I am, unrespectable and unashamed, waving from truthful territory.” And that is, honestly, the best description for everything else in Misbehaving at the Crossroads — with the exception of the unrespectable part. What I deeply admire and respect is the honesty in these words, especially: “It was hard to travel here, and even more frightening to admit that once, I was a coward. I wanted acceptance so badly that I fell in love with my own defeat.” My goodness, I have been there. I thought I was the only one. Thank God for Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ voice in this American wilderness, echoing across the centuries, to remind us that we are not the only ones trying so hard to tell the truth, trying so hard to fall in love with victory instead of defeat.

What I think I know about courage on the page, I learned from Black poetry and Black poets.

April is National Poetry Month, and I’ve been thinking about this process of making myself be a certain kind of writer because some of the first writers I admired deeply were poets. But even though some of my earliest published work was poetry, and I aspire to keep a poetic rhythm in my language, I have never easily classified myself as a poet.

Aside from the marketing of work, I’m not sure it really matters. But for me, this resistance comes mostly out of respect for “real poets” or the poets that shaped what I believed was possible for a Black woman writer in America.

The 90s were a confusing time to practice poetry, or even to feel confident writing it, because the predominant forms of practice in the Bronx transmitted to the world at that time were extroverted forms like rap music and spoken word. I gravitated naturally to Alice Walker’s work, in the 1973 Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems, and Nikki Giovanni, may she rest in peace. Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf – along with The Love Space Demands, which, honestly, I didn’t understand, but I sure did adore that title! – rocked my world so hard that I directed (with zero previous experience as a director of…anything) a production of it at my predominately white boarding school.

There is a specificity and precision in poetry that I love; a beautiful distillation of language and concepts that I find soothing. In times like these, when history and the artistic merit of Black thought and creation is under attack, I turn to the poets, whose work embodies resistance to me, creating a voice where others insist there should instead be silence, obedience, possibly both.

I wrote my first published poem, “Woman warrior” when I was 18, under my not-quite-pen name J. Victoria Sanders. It was published a couple of years later in a hard-to-find now anthology called Quiet Storm: Voices of Young Black Poets. But I never received a contributor’s copy because I was still technically homeless even though I was well into my junior year at Vassar when the book was published. My mother had been evicted from our Bronx apartment the year before, and I effectively didn’t have another stable address except for school.

It wasn’t until 16 years after the anthology was published that, when I visited a used bookstore in Washington, D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, that I found a copy of the anthology – a miracle to me, a moment among moments of self-rediscovery that I had been trying for in those early years after my parents died, and I was trying to remember the girl they raised me to be, the dreams they might have had, if things had been a little easier, particularly for my mom.

I’m planning to write more this month about how poetry and Black poets in particular, have taught me so much, have been essential to raising me up in a way, and fortifying me when I don’t have language or words of my own. I made this list in my Bookshop store of some of my favorites, and I may add more.

I’m curious, for you loving writers and readers out there: Do you like poetry? Who are your favorite poets? Do you have a favorite poet or poem? If you are so inclined, I’d love to hear if there are special poets or poems that carry special meaning to and for you.

I never learned to ride a bike because during a short stint in foster care as a five-year-old, I refused pink, the offensive-to-me-then color of the girly bike my foster mother insisted on. Blue was for boys back then, and I understood it, but I was (am) a Batman fan, and the deeper, more midnight the blue, the better. Pink or no bike, she said, so we left Sears without a bike for Joshunda. Being the Capricorn I am, I was good with that even as a little girl, because stubborn shouldn’t always win, but it was pretty much all I had that was mine.

A few decades later, when I thought I would never have a loving ceremony or a partnership worthy of celebration, I married my love in a royal blue dress I scored on sale at Macy’s. We exchanged vows under a turbulent turquoise sky threatening rain over a majestic beach. The clouds parted as I sang “Ribbon in the Sky,” and the sun shined on us for a bit as we reveled in each other and dipped our toes in that wide beautiful Atlantic.

I had not thought about these two stories until I was almost done with Imani Perry’s beautiful latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Her book is characteristically evocative, educational, thought-provoking, challenging and lush. It was, for me, the kind of reading experience I believe readers look forward to the most — you get to see yourself in pages that outline a specific way of seeing, to respond with memories and reflections of your own related to the text.

The book covers blues as music, as art, as a way of being, as a whole mood throughout history. Blue-black skin, blue gums, true blue as dependable honesty and True Blue, the slave ship trafficking indigo and enslaved Black people — it’s all here. How, I wondered, would Dr. Imani Perry tie all of these things together in her graceful, grace-filled way? Notice I did not ask “if” — one of the promises of a master writer is that you know you will be treated to beauty, even if you are not sure what form the beauty will take.

One form beauty takes in Black in Blues is a catalog of memory and remembrance:

One of the remedies we who study Black life have pursued is diligent recovery in the face of being forgotten, obscured, or submerged. We piece together clues and uncover hidden stories. This work is important because the work of remembering is also the work of asserting value to what and who is remembered.

Another is the delight of an educator’s revelation, at least to me/this reader, of a fact I wish I knew a long time ago, such as George Washington Carver’s innovativeness in re-creating a rare Egyptian blue he called Oxidation #9:

It caused an immediate sensation. By detailing the oxidation number and process, Carver showed the world how to replicate a color that had been cherished two thousand plus years prior. But no one in the Western world had yet been known to re-create it precisely until George Washington Carver. Representatives from paint companies excitedly trekked to Tuskegee, Alabama, to purchase his formula for Egyptian blue, along with his other paints, including a striking version of Prussian blue. And as is common in such stories, Carver does not appear to have been fairly compensated for his innovation. But that didn’t dissuade his constant innovation. He was driven by beauty and care rather than accumulation. He described the things that money could not buy as the “imperishables” and treasured them accordingly.

There is more to discover in Dr. Perry’s own words, in a little over 240 pages, including some glorious photographs of blue artifacts and artwork she describes in essays throughout. So I won’t quote half the book here, though I’d like to. I’ll leave you with one of my other favorite highlighted passages though, and you should go buy her book and read the other clean, resonant sentences for yourself:

We — the people who encounter the beauty of an artist’s work — are also experiencing labor, process, and memory; we are part of their transformation and transposing of our relationship to the past. Frequently, Black people speak of being haunted by the past: slavery, conquest, Jim Crow, colonialism. But the artists teach us people of today to haunt the past, to whisper to the ancestors and rearrange the materiality of their lives with our care, to show them they are respected and loved. A haunt is a place we frequent. To haunt is to trouble or frequent somewhere. We haunt the past to refuse to let it lie comfortably as it was. We give back to them in return for the inheritances they have bestowed upon us.

While I’ve been catching up to my personal life, I’ve also been catching up on my reading, slowly but surely, including a couple of leftovers from the end of last year. Of these, one of my favorites was Tiya Miles’ Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, focused on revealing more of the humanity of Harriet Tubman, whose life has been mythologized in ways that don’t entirely do her justice.

Night Flyer was a little lengthy to me, but that’s what it takes to be exhaustive about a legendary American. Harriet Tubman is one of my favorite historical figures, and I feel like I am always learning more about her. During my research for my debut novel, Women of the Post — dedicated to General Tubman — I learned that Tubman was one of the first recorded Black women to lead a major military operation during the Civil War. I dedicated the book to her, and to all Black women veterans erased in our history, because it has taken me until my adulthood to gather the different pieces of this history of hers, this long tradition of Black womens’ military service and it’s a history all our children should know. Particularly because we are too often reduced or diminished as critics of patriotism, as opposed to torchbearers for love of a country that is, at best, indifferent to us, at worst, overtly hostile and trying to kill us. I believe it was Toni Morrison who alerted me to the fact that Tubman had to fight for the pension she was due for her service. Eventually, she won.

In any event, I was reminded from Night Flyer that Harriet Tubman became disabled early in life while she was enslaved — and it is new for me to think of Harriet Tubman as a person with a disability. This is the kind of erasure that even well-meaning historians — in Tubman’s case, mainly white women historians — participate in when repeating oral histories or attempting to reconstruct lost histories. It made me wonder if talking about Tubman and her disability felt like it would change the way others viewed her. It only made me respect her complexities more, and look forward to the work that is underway to talk more about her life in the context of disability.

I was particularly moved by the context Miles created for the way Harriet Tubman moved through the world, her connection to her faith and to wilderness in particular. This passage stayed with me:

The wilderness she encountered at the time of adolescence threatened and simultaneously transformed her life. It was a place of confounding double meanings: negative and positive, dreadful and revelatory, metaphorical and physical. And beyond this, the concept of a “wilderness experience” has two connotations in traditional Black culture that have changed over time, the theologian Delores Williams has explained. Starting around the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans usually represented the wilderness as a psycho-emotional circumstance of suffering, “a near-destruction situation in which God gives personal direction to the believer and thereby helps her make her way out of what she thought was no way,” Williams has written. Prior to 1900 and dating back centuries, though, an older sense of the term took a more hopeful cast, emphasizing the physical wilderness as a special space of religious experience described by enslaved people in songs and stories…Wilderness for them — dense vegetation and tree cover — was an actual site of spiritual refuge. In these natural places out of view, seekers might expect to have profound religious experiences.

Among other things folks may not know about me, I am a huge fan of the outdoors, particularly of parks and when I can get to it, the forest. More on that again sometime. In the meantime, Night Flyer is beautiful and worth a read.

Speaking of worthy reads, I was perhaps intentionally late to reading On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. Originally published in February 2017, it has profound lessons for the Black community in particular and in these times: What I loved was the advice to read books, to prioritize community gatherings and to be unafraid to stand out. It’s a short read, with a long Hold time at the library, but still worth a listen or a read, I think, if you’re looking for “things you can do” — or not do — in reactions to the political cruelty that continues to unfurl around us.

Finally, I have been hesitant to write anything about the late, great, Zora Neale Hurston’s book, The Life of Herod the Great, apparently recovered from the ashes of her home late in life. Zora spent more than a decade researching Herod for this novel, which, as you might expect for a posthumous work, has flashes of Zora’s noteworthy beauty in it, but for me, never really came together. I loved learning the context in Zora’s words, about how she became so fascinated with Herod, though. She writes in the preface,

Polybius, the ancient Greek philosopher…lectured to his disciples: Be a realist and a rationalist. Seek the heart of matters. Know history, for there is ‘no more a ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past.’ ‘It is history, and history alone, which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or the posture of affairs.’ History may be a lantern of understanding held up to the present and the future.

To that sentiment, I say, amen.

Speaking of this, I’ve been reading and writing on the Internet for a pretty long time. Back in the day, before it was owned by Amazon, I used Goodreads to keep track of how many books I wanted to read each year, and to look at reviews. And while I still pop in to Goodreads now and then because I’m nosy about other people’s reviews and what they’re reading and it’s still the best way to find that out in a crowd-sourcing type way, I don’t list how many books I want to read at the beginning or end of any year anymore. It’s too much pressure to put on my brain, for one, and two, I don’t view the quantity of books anyone reads as a signifier of anything. Also, I’m competitive with myself about working out and about getting words on the page, but I’m not trying to compete with strangers over who reads the most.

I’m going to get to the list soon, I promise. But the reason I mention all of the above, is that I value reading books when I can get to them and when I’m called to read them, which is usually not on any kind of publisher’s release and/or marketing schedule. This can mean that I feel a little out of step with the culture, but what ends up happening is that I give myself more space as a writer and a thinker to be with a book for as long as I need to in order to form an opinion that adds value, I hope, to those who are also interested in the books I’m interested in.

I will say that it’s a funny thing to feel like you’re part of the conversation but on a time delay when books are in the news or the social media zeitgeist. I just want y’all to know there is a method to the madness over here, even if it can feel random. Thank you for rocking with me and the way my brain works.

OK, without further delay, my favorite books of 2024, available here on my affiliate page at Bookshop, which earns me a commission when you shop that allows me to keep my content here free (thank you!) This is my final post of 2024, and if you’re celebrating, happy everything, Merry Christmas, see you in early 2025.

We Will Rest! The Art of Escape by Tricia Hersey

Beautiful Books Released This Year I’m Still Reading That Would Probably Make This List

The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America by Aaron Robertson

Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History by Anthony E. Kaye

I loved We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance first because of its stunning cover, an image painted by the artist Taha Clayton, but I became immersed in it because of its clarity, confidence and thorough dismissal of Black international refusal throughout history.

I know, I know: Books and their covers. But listen: A glance at this beautiful Black woman with her shotgun suggests a defiance that pulses through every page and section of this treasure, my favorite read of 2024. Maybe that’s not even saying a lot given that I read slow in this jam-packed, shenanigan filled turn around the sun (Goodreads put the total at 34, which is light weight for me). But I view books a little like children and it’s always hard for me to name one a fave — but here we are.

Given this country’s discomfort with white supremacy and threats to it in the form of Black refusal, even a defiance rooted in love — as this book is — I understand why no major media lists I’ve seen, anyway, would select this book as part of their roundups. It’s incendiary and confrontational and a lot of people are not ready for this truth.

But, for now, we’re still free enough to indulge the beauty, nuance and complexity within the pages of a more complete history of how Black people have gotten over, persevered through and survived. So let’s get into it.

The sum of what I could have told you about Black historical revolution and resistance before reading We Refuse is this:

• Haiti is still being punished for being the first Black nation in the world to fight and win its liberation.

• Nat Turner was a prophet and visionary, but folks prefer to talk about nonviolent revolutions, which are probably not technically revolutions but they are at least permissible to discuss.

• General Harriet Tubman was both an overt and covert resistor, and the same could be said for Black Panthers.

• I admired and still do, Angela Davis and Assata Shakur and Afeni Shakur and Cleo Silvers and the women of the Black Panther Party who did not get their due for how they transformed Black communities with their care and attention, mainly because of American discomfort with the reality that Black women have always resulted to any means necessary to protect our families. (Margaret Garner, who inspired Beloved, comes immediately to mind, but there are several others noted in We Refuse.)

What I learned reading We Refuse is this: White violence is a default in this country, stemming back to the American Revolution. Black violence is so scary and threatening because white violence is a way of embracing American citizenship. This is why patriotism is so fraught for Black folks, because to love this country is to be willing to both kill and to die for it, and whenever Black people have tried to offer ourselves, white people have been afraid that we would follow this rule that they have made.

I learned a lot more, but I want to back up and tell you that when I posted a note on Substack saying I was obsessed with this book, I was not exaggerating. In the weeks following the election, I was scanning my TBR list and shelves for something that would lift me up and I kept coming back to this book, but I was afraid reading it would unlock a kind of rage that I didn’t quite have the emotional capacity for at that moment.

Then, there was a family emergency and I had to fly to Oklahoma twice in the span of three weeks. It was all really sad. I don’t cope well with being overwhelmed and sad, maybe nobody does, but the one thing that always works is a good book. I had a little multi-colored highlighter and We Refuse, and I took it on the plane, and once I started highlighting and underlining things and dog-earing pages, I couldn’t stop.

I brought it home with me while we waiting for news about our loved one’s funeral services and when we had to go back. I took it to lunch with me after Thanksgiving when we were trying to recover from the intensity and grief of it all and highlighted some more. And then when I was done, as soon as I finished the acknowledgements, I was so sad that it was over, which is what happens when I read a beautiful book: I rejoice that I had the good sense to finish it, but I mourn because the experience is done.

We Refuse is divided in five substantial chapters that define refusal as revolution, protection, force, flight and joy. Because I am most interested in joy as resistance, I was elated to read this in the introduction:

Finally, joy is possibly the most important and strongest remedy that makes a push for Black personhood. While anti-Black violence has profoundly impacted the African American historical experience, it is not the totality of Blackness. While whiteness cannot be separated from violence, Blackness can be separated from oppression. The most powerful tool the Black Panther Party (BPP) employed was not guns but joy. Black pride invoked hope and happiness, which could be shields from the demoralizing and degenerative effects of racism. In jest and in truth, James Brown once said, ‘The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.’ There is no civil rights movement without singing. What was the long freedom struggle without music?…As Imani Perry wrote for The Atlantic, ‘Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.’ Joy is typically understood within a spiritual context and works in tandem with suffering.

When I tell you I was not ready for these bars, I mean it. The above, and sentences like, “The past shapes our creative potential to think a new, better world into being.” Or, “What is so powerful about protection is that protected people protect people.”

If you have not read We Refuse or did not plan to, I invite you to change that if any of the above resonates with you. I’ll be thinking about it and returning to the ideas it opened up in me for some time, and I hope more people find it as edifying as I did. There is deep power and liberation in knowing all the ways our ancestors, particularly the Black women who kept us alive before these times, as dark and complicated as any before, protected us with more than their love, but with their agency.

The first line of that review as I drafted it reads: “In 2012, the U.S. healthcare industry made more than $849 billion, but Americans are far sicker than residents in other nations.” I’m so sure that the profit-driven healthcare system annually makes much more than that figure now and it makes me furious that among the Americans who are the sickest are Black.

So much of what I read in Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Dr. Uché Blackstock, I already knew, both from my professional world and from my personal experience. Growing up poor in this country as the child of a mother with multiple mental health issues showed me all the cracks in the system, and how easy it was to slip through. I did not know what a primary care physician was until I was old enough to work a job with decent health insurance. I spent so much time at student dental clinics, I had no idea what it felt like to have (and afford) a primary dentist until I was nearly 40 years old. My main dental care consisted of a lot of Anbesol and aspirin.

There are millions of stories like mine, but Dr. Blackstock’s book is the first accounting of how racism moves in healthcare from the perspective of a Black woman physician, and that perspective matters greatly. Journalists I admire, like Linda Villarosa, and rappers I like, like Eve, have written similar personal accounts verified by data: Under the Skin opens with Linda’s jarring experience as a respected journalist having to ensure she was well-dressed at the hospital to keep the staff from treating them the way most non-Black people (notice I did not say white) treat us when we need care.

I just finished listening to Eve’s memoir, Who’s That Girl? and it was a cool listen; I didn’t expect to hear her talk about her fertility journey which resulted in the birth of her son, Wild, toward the end of the book, or the grueling, painful experience she had losing the baby that she carried before Wild was born. I immediately thought about Serena Williams and Beyonce — regardless of how much money, fame and clout these women have, racism has persistently reminded Black people that the systems in this country would rather that we die, that our children do not live, than to ensure that we can make it to the other side of whatever ails us.

This is one of many reasons Black people are generally raised with a good amount of distrust and with the belief that the healthcare system will not treat us as human. What system in America does? This includes points that Dr. Blackstock points out including Black people being used as guinea pigs without our consent, the enslaved Black women - Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey — who were operated on without their consent and without anesthesia by the so-called father of Gynecology.

I'm not a big fan of revisiting trauma — on my own behalf or that of others — in order to form the shape of a story to come. But I was drawn into Legacy by the love that shaped it and the defiant, clear vision that forms its calls to action. Dr. Blackstock’s story is so beautiful, beginning with her mother as a graduate of Harvard Medical School (“The original Dr. Blackstock”!) and the way she passed on that legacy to Dr. Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, making them the first mother-daughter legacies from Harvard.

It was informative, if not surprising, to see in Legacy that the shameful ways that the American health and healthcare system ignores Black pain, disregards Black life from birth to death also extends to Black healthcare providers — because how could it not?You may not learn new information about the reach of racism in healthcare from reading Legacy, but this brave, thoughtful and honest account is worth reading as a powerful reminder of what we’re up against nonetheless.