You had a friendship bracelet business in elementary school, so you knew what work was. You convinced your father to take you to Michael’s Craft Store to buy the embroidery string, the safety pins, the bobbins to wrap the string around, the clear plastic box to organize it all.
You could knot the string into intricate designs: the tornado, the V, rows of diamond- bodied fish, hearts, and rainbows. You watched your father build an invoice sheet for his computer business and so you did, too. Classmate/customers could custom-design their friendship bracelets with the colors, and wait a few days and you would hand deliver the fresh wrist adornments during recess or lunch, and they paid the $0.75 - $2.00 depending on what design they chose.
Eventually, you had enough business to have one or two people knotting the embroidery string into bracelets for you, and so all you had to do was take the orders, give the orders, take the money, and deliver the product. Some weeks you made $12.00—$15.00, and after you paid your employees, you still had something like $5 or $6 left over—enough to buy a Capri Sun + Crunchy Cheetos for snacks instead of the no-name-brand juice and cheese crackers. After you made your premium snack allotment, you decided to save the rest. You put some of your earnings in your sea shell jewelry box you inherited after your Aunt Olive died, and once almost had $100.00 tucked away in there. You didn’t quite know what you wanted to do with all of that money, but, you were proud that you had it anyhow.
Your uncle Junior stayed with y’all on account of Tommy, Weesie’s foster boy, sleeping in Junior’s bed now, was eating up Junior’s sausage patties and salmon cakes and grits. Drinking Junior’s Ginger Chek Soda. Your mama Rhina couldn’t let Junior stay in the house too long either because The Learning Funhouse Daycare was an in-house childcare operation and the Department of Social Services loved to do unannounced visits and if it was evidenced that Junior was staying there while the six children—cousins mostly—Rhina could lose her license and they all could lose the house. Because you heard your parents argue about the cost of rent and why Rhina needed to max out her six slots allotted for children instead of a more comfortable four.
Though the house was crowded, and on most days since he got back from jail he slept on the floor of your room, Uncle Junior was nice enough to you, especially after his second child was born and no one had enough to scrounge for bail so he had to stay in jail and y’all all prayed he’d be out early on good behavior.
You watched his baby girl Nella for him because you loved them both. You taught her how to drink out of a straw, and eat real food. She had a hard time learning to say your whole name so she started calling you Mika and it stuck. You were there when she first learned to walk, unassisted by her toy vacuum cleaner.
Once Weesie’s money ran out for canteen, and then, too, collect calls, you thought about how lonely Uncle Junior must have been in that jail cell, all alone and no one from the outside seeing about him. So, you wrote him once or twice. You gave him snippets of house gossip you had—you heard Tommy was making friends with the NewCastle Ganstas, and he had stopped working at Hardee’s. Y’all all knew that because your father, called Major, had stopped by Hardees three times on three different occasions when he said he was working and he wasn’t there. And yet, he had in his room the nicest stereo with a five CD disc changer (you left out in your letter the part that you saw it in his room the night Tommy asked you to lay in bed with him, and you did, fully-clothed, but that’s how you saw it).
When your $100.00 went missing though, you knew it was uncle Junior but couldn’t prove it. No one but you knew you had it, and so everyone’s first question was always: how did you get $100.00? What you need that kind of money for, Mika?
Major felt sorry for you in the way that he does and said he would help you replace it, so maybe don’t make much of a fuss of it to everyone. It was hard to believe that uncle Junior would go so far as to take from the only person who thought to still care about him in some way when he had been locked up, and hard for you to believe that he didn’t understand that you used your nice stationery and Thurgood Marshall stamps so he could have a piece of home with him on the inside.
So you made up your $100.00 deficit by babysitting on the weekends. You kept Malik and Ayanna from 10:00am until their parents came to get them at 6:00pm. You walked the tots through breakfast, lunch, snack just like you watched Rhina do during the week when you were home on summer or school breaks, sad that you couldn’t go to summer camp like your classmates or sleepway camp like on Bug Juice—the reality show about a sleepaway summer camp on the Disney Channel. Malik and Ayanna’s moms paid you $25.00 for the full day and then Rhina and Major asked for $5.00 each kid to replace the chicken nuggets, instant grits, and animal crackers and milk you used up. It was good, easy money.
Mr. Eliot, your sister Sasha’s program Director at the Boys & Girl’s Club, had been asking if you were looking for summer work one day when you accompanied her to the afterschool program and noticed that you weren’t restless like the other kids. Your focus on your social studies and English homework was “commendable” he said, raising his left eyebrow. You liked Mr. Eliot because he was tall like Major, but he had finished college and talked to you about Black history and Black literature and slavery in a way that Major never did and of course, like none of your white teachers—not even the ones you liked.
He asked you how old you were, and you said 14, and he asked if you ever worked before? You said yes. For your father’s computer business, which was technically true though you never got compensated. Whenever Major was out of the house, customers called with their computer problems. Once Jack Jones called to say his WordPerfect program was frozen and so you walked him through the process of finding and pressing all of CTRL + ALT + DELETE at the same time. You waited on the phone with him listening to him breathing and calling out the commands while the computer restarted and auto recovery had returned to him the flyer for the used Honda Civic he was trying to sell. Jack thanked you profusely and reported your good services to Major and soon enough you were his Software Troubleshooter.
Another time Ms. White who did your father’s taxes called to say her Encyclopedia Britannica program disc was swallowed by the computer and you had told her to get a safety pin or paperclip and unfold the little piece of metal until it was one long stick. You didn’t ask why she didn’t have a paperclip—doesn’t everyone have them?—but when she said she didn’t have one you thought quickly on your feet and asked if she had a cookie tin with sewing supplies? She laughed and asked how did you know? Everyone has one, you said. You told her to get the longest sewing needle and use that. To go to the front of the CPU unit and stick the needle in the tiny hole just beneath where the CD goes and push hard. Ms. White squealed when the computer tower relinquished the disc. You were now the Major Communications and Services Software and Hardware troubleshooter, unofficially. Though, one of Major’s customers was so impressed that a little Black girl knew so much about computers and spoke so articulately about how to fix problems, you were featured on the local news segment about your knowledge so that verified your title.
When you tell Mr. Eliot this, and of course about your friendship bracelet business and babysitting services, he first asks if you might keep his own son one Saturday or two? Then he asks for your resume, says he might be able to help you find a real job—he lifted his eyebrow again—to make some real money.
The little paperclip man in Microsoft word helped enough for you to draft a document that looked like the templates titled “Resume.” When you printed it and colored in the heart next to your name because you didn’t have a color printer, you were proud, even when Mr. Eliot smiled and pointed to it and said its nice and to keep an eye out for a call from Tonya Young at Youth Workforce Development.
Sasha had seen you hand Mr. Eliot a piece of paper but didn’t know about the arrangement. He was still smiling when he folded the hard won resume that you stayed up half the night for into a small square and slipped it into his gym shorts pocket—the same pocket that had his whistles and keys and lanyard sticking out. Determined to not be defeated by his lack of care about the document he asked you to prepare, you straightened your back when Sasha inquired and told her that Mr. Eliot had asked you for a resume and would help you get a real job this summer.
You didn’t figure into what it would mean for everyone else’s life for you to have a real job, Monday through Friday for six weeks over the summer, but here you were. When you told your father, he sighed. Major now had to accommodate an early morning drop off and afternoon pick up during the summer when even he thought he had a reprieve. You tell him the Department of Health and Environmental Control building was just across the parking lot from the State Archives building where you and Vanessa had gone to accept the Regional and State awards for 8th grade advanced history research papers. Vanessa’s mom felt bad for you when you said you might not be able to attend to accept the award for best paper in the whole state of South Carolina because you didn’t have anyone to take you and stay all day, even though it was a Saturday. There was a football game that day at the university and on those days, Major had to post up in a small four ft by four ft room to ensure that the broadcast went off without a hitch.
You never asked Rhina to take you anywhere, and that weekend was her bi-weekly hair salon appointment and it was time for her relaxer and she could not, would not, miss it. So it was you and Vanessa, and Vanessa’s mom. Major sent you with $5 for lunch, but Vanessa’s mom bought the $8 sandwich and Coke and said congrats after you accepted the award.
The first few days of your real work were real boring. There is no other way for you to describe it when Major asks how it went. By Wednesday, you begged Sasha to let you take her Discman so at least you could listen to music while your supervisor shrugged and pretended to drum up real work for you to do. You were stationed in the water control division where residents just outside of Columbia, SC who had well water sources had to bring in samples of water to make sure all of the allowable amounts of chemicals weren’t above the undrinkable amounts. You couldn’t imagine there were people who didn’t live with the same type of water you had, wasn’t it, what 1999 now?, but there still were, and a whole operation went along to make sure people’s water was safe to drink.
You had many hours of idle moments waiting for someone to come in with a mason jar or Sprite bottle of cloudy water. You were instructed to put on latex gloves to handle the sample—a new pair each time—so as not to jeopardize the integrity of the test.
You put whatever container they brought the sample in into a gallon-sized ziplock bag, and waited for them to fill out the required intake paperwork. Everyone in that department was white, and it amazed you how many folks who may or may not have had safe drinking water reminded you of your grandparents Weesie or Teeta or any number of their friends.
When the older black man who looked like he could have been Deacon Jackson’s father shuffled to your desk, you brought out your “Yes Sir’s” and “No Sir’s,” and even, when you saw him struggling to negotiate the small text on the page you first handed him a magnifying glass like what Teeta would have used for reading his Bible, but when the gentleman studied it and held it up to his face, close like a monocle, you shook your head, picked up the pen and asked his name, address, how long had he been living at the residence with a well, etc, until the paperwork was filled out. You asked him to sign and he simply marked an X, and despite protocol, you found an empty bottle to transfer his sample from the 409 cleaning solution bottle he brought it in into one that would be accepted for processing.
The gentleman kissed your gloved hand and held it a touch too long while he thanked you for your help. You had saved him from embarrassment, he said. You were much nicer than anyone in here had had ever been to him after all these years. He said it loud enough for your supervisor to look up. The man that looked like he could have been Teeta, if he had lived, smiled at you and tipped his hat on his way out.
You went home your first week of work feeling like maybe you made a difference, and despite the long lulls and the long hour you had for lunch staring at a television with court shows, you wondered why it was Major came home each day, looking worn down.
He tells you because he doesn’t have a “nice cushion-y office job” like you.
The next week found you folded over a counter top with a mountain of labels and a barrel of empty test bottles. Your supervisor explained that because this was a work-to-learn environment for summer interns, every week would look different. This week: affixing labels on 10,000 bottles for the number of known well-water users within a two-hour radius of Columbia. He chuckled when he said this should keep you busy, and you were so thankful you snuck out of the house Sasha’s Mariah Carey CD and even though you didn’t care for it, her Tom Petty CD, and the Cranberries. You made due with what you had at your ready.
Because your grandfather, your grandmothers, all at one point worked as cleaning people in big office buildings, and many times you accompanied them, you smile at the janitor who mops the floor of the hallway outside your office every day after lunch. When Teeta had retired from working as the Mental Health Hospital Mortuary Lab Assistant, and because he and Weesie still needed some money, he started cleaning a network of Dialysis Centers along Two Notch Road. You did anything Teeta did, even waited in an empty dialysis room pushing the reclining chairs back and upright, back and upright, back and upright, because what else was there for you to do? His shift started before the center closed, and you saw how the white nurses didn’t look at him, not even the patients. Once there was a white nurse who saw Teeta walk in, you carrying a broom behind him, and the dustpan, and out of his back pocket like a tail or wedding dress train was the clear trash bags that he replaced each receptacle with. The nurse rolled her eyes, even though Teeta said Good Evening, and she balled up whatever paper was next to her and looked at the other white nurse who never even turned in your direction, and threw the ball of paper right at you both. It came and it came toward you like a bullet, and then it hit the floor. The nurse who didn’t throw the paper said something about “missing the trash” and they both shrugged and went back to whatever it was they were not doing. It took enough of these aggressions to teach you to acknowledge the invisible people.
When the janitor mopped his way by your bottle-label-assembly line for the third time and scrubbed real hard, you looked up, nodded, and smiled like you were taught. He motioned for you to remove your headphones. You do. He asks what you are listening to, and that day you snuck out Major’s “The Best of the Spinners” and “The Best of the O’Jays” CD. He called you “Young Gun” when he heard what you were listening to, and hadn’t yet asked your name. One time, you heard your supervisor say he wished Tony didn’t use so much water when he mopped the floors during the height of water-sample-intake time, so you knew his name. You smiled when he said Young Gun, and maybe you shrugged your shoulders, but you were careful to only walk on the area of the hallway he hadn’t mopped yet when you walked to the bathroom, and looked back at him so he could see your conscientiousness, and he was looking and you smile again, and slink into the bathroom.
The next day Tony mopped by again, of course. You don’t have to look at the clock to know it was 2:15pm. On time. This time your supervisor had snuck out for a cigarette break so you were alone in the intake room and Tony stuck his head in, asked you what you were up to. You tell him summer work, trying to “make a dollar out of fifteen cents”—you say this knowing he will be impressed with your reference, and he goes, “tell me sister, can you spare a dime?” And does a little jig while raising his voice. Just like the O’Jays. You laugh, think of your father. They both have goatees, though Tony’s is more grey. He has a stomach that rolls over his belt, and a vest that is a touch too small, and you can’t help but think of Winnie the Pooh when you see Tony. Wonder if he rests his arm on his belly after a good meal. But who are you to judge? You still can’t order clothes from Delia’s or the Junior’s section of Belk, not since Teeta died and everyone kept buying you chocolate and your favorite roast beef and cheddar junior sandwich from Hardee’s. Anyways, Tony is in the room with you, and you had a moment, and finally he asks you your name and you tell him, and you hear him start to say he has something, but then he stops. He probably was going to say daughter. He stops and then pulls out of his back pocket his cloth CD case, one that was almost exactly what you hoped to buy with your first paycheck.
Tony plops down the CD case on the table on top of the water bottle labels, and tells you to peek inside. You look at him while you’re opening it, and if your mother saw you she might have popped you in the mouth for the ways your eyes curved up instead of focusing on the thing you were doing. You rub your hands along the canvas case, admire it first. It’s probably a 20-CD holder. You ask him if he has any Michael Jackson, because that’s probably what Major would say he liked to listen to, and he laughs when you open the CD case and Tony is presenting you with: Dead Prez Let’s Get Free; Miles Davis Sketches of Spain and New York Girl; Missy Elliott Supa Dupa Fly (you knew this because of the afternoons you watched TRL and 106 & Park); Notorious BIG Ready to Die; and Charlie Parker Orinthology.
From sitting at Weesie’s and Teeta’s sides during spades while you were learning and not playing, you know how to not give up anything you don’t want to by expressions on your face.
You keep your face as stoic as possible now to not give up your hand that you have no idea who these artists are—except Missy Elliot and maybe Notorious BIG, but uncle Junior was definitely a West Coast music head so you know at least that if you knew Tupac, you did not know Biggie’s music.
Tony leans in close on the table and at first you wonder why he smells familiar, and then you realize it’s the second-hand smoke caught in his clothes, covered by Old Spice. He says you can borrow his collection to keep you company while you’re at work, and if you had a CD-W on your computer at home (you did, you showed off knowing that you knew what he was saying) you could take it home to copy the CD’s and bring them back tomorrow.
You had to think about how to ask Major for blank CD’s and also how to copy CD’s without showing him that you had these CD’s from Tony to copy because then he’d want to know how you got them, and how do you say a Black man at work gave them to you? He did show you how to download Napster though and how to choose more stable MP3 files and even though you had to clog up the phone line overnight while you waited for two songs to download, you were starting to gather some of the songs from Mariah Carey albums you didn’t have yet.
You remember this fact and decide to just ask him for an advance on your paycheck so that you could buy CD’s to burn your Napster songs so you can have more music at work, and of course a CD case for you to carry them in so as not to scratch. You knew exactly which one you wanted.
Major tells you actually he was planning on taking you to the Credit Union to open up your own savings account. Because you were getting a check from a real job you could also get a checking account but it would also have his name on it because you are a minor, but, you could get checks, and your own stack of deposit and withdrawal slips with an account number that was especially yours. Because you now worked real hours for your real job, Major met you outside the moss-covered DHEC building Thursday during your lunch hour. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to set it up, he tells you, and then says that it would be ready for you to deposit and cash the check tomorrow. You didn’t remember telling him that you got paid that day, but he said because DHEC was a state agency and he too worked for a state agency the pay periods were the same. You shrugged. On the way to the Credit Union Major tries to tell you about managing money and says that he would cut you a deal: for every dollar you put into your savings, he would put in a dollar so that your money could double by the end of the summer. You would more than replace the $100.00 that went missing and that you tried to make up by babysitting, and you could have real money sitting in a real bank account that uncle Junior could not touch.
You like the idea of that and agree to the challenge. Friday comes and Major picks you up again during lunch to deposit the check in the bank. He encourages you to take out $20.00 for next week’s lunch, and you look at him. He smiles, says, You’re making real money now, Mika. You fill out the withdrawal slip for $40.00, and when Major asks what’s that for you say to cover any yard sale or flea market shopping you would be doing with Weesie, and also to purchase a sweet snack from the vending machine, which was two doors down from Tony’s office. You don’t mention Tony.
Major drops you back off to work, and you hear the slop slopping of the mop coming down the hall. Because your supervisor is in the room, you sneak off this time, say you need to use the bathroom. You don’t know why you feel like you can’t talk to your colleague—how you heard Major call the people who go into the same office with him—out in the open, but you tip toe down the unmopped side of the hallway towards the bathroom, and Tony stops and watches you walk towards him, smiling.
You pre-empt the conversation and say afternoon, say you didn’t have any leftover CD’s and could you hold his CD’s for the weekend and copy and bring them back on Monday? Tony says sure thing Young Gun, enjoy them this weekend. You motion back to the office and scurry back to affix labels on the water-sample bottles.
Weesie has no idea where you disappeared to when you asked her to go to Walmart to buy some school supplies and she looked for you in all of the aisles and you were already at the front, checked out, and waiting with a plastic bag. You asked the clerk to double-bag the CD case and the blank CD’s because you’ll need to figure out how to bring them into the house without anyone asking. You haven’t thought this all the way through or else you would have bought some pens, or a new notebook. You would have left yourself some actual money for lunch next week, but the two purchases took up the majority of the money you took out, and now you have to get to next Friday (Major promised to take you every week to help you manage your money better) with $9.87 and the sandwich from the cafeteria costs $7.00 after tax. You knew Weesie would take you to the Walmart without questions, but the computer you needed was at home so now you had to tell Weesie that you forgot you had to babysit Malik this weekend and actually you needed to go home tonight. You’d come back next week. Weesie looks absolutely disappointed because she had wanted to go out into the country to the special flea market and didn’t want to drive out that way by herself, but you tell her you can go next week and you tell her you have a job now so you can help with gas money. Weesie drives you home.
Of course, you forget on Monday you were moved to a different department all together.
Monday went by and you now have two CD cases in your little purse, with your Discman and you were ready to see Tony to give him his CD’s back and, you smiled because it rained that day and you wanted to walk up to Tony and say, “It’s my window // I can’t stand the rain.”
After you buy the Captain's Wafers Cream Cheese & Chives Crackers because they were only $.50 in the vending machine for lunch, you return to your computer desk. Not only were you on a new floor, but they didn’t have AOL so you couldn’t even go online. Eventually, you gave up the lyric’d music and went for Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain that Tony had given you. You liked this because it was music that Major didn’t listen to, so you felt more educated, more…refined. You had jazz now. Real Jazz.
It didn’t occur to you yet that Tony wouldn’t be in the hallway at 2:00pm because he’d be mopping the third floor, probably looking for you. You didn’t think about that when you went out to the restroom thinking you’d hear the squeegee of the mop against the tile hallway.
The rest of the week went on like this: Major driving you to work, not giving you lunch money, you typing the same three words into small boxes, trying to learn the words to the new music you had but no one to talk to about it, and so on. Thursday morning, Major made mention he would take you to the bank during lunch so you could get money out to go with Weesie to the flea market for the weekend. You wait outside for Major to drive up, and of course he is late.
You told your supervisor you’d be back by 2:00PM, and it was 1:25PM which meant if Major did show up you really only had time to go to the bank and then come right back. No convincing him to stop by Hardee’s. Another cheese cracker lunch.
On the way to the credit union, Major instructs you on how to look for the withdrawal slips, and the whole process. While you are at the counter filling out the appropriate paperwork, Major asks you how much you think you might need for the weekend trip? You tell him you promised Weesie some gas money, so $10, plus $20 for you for the week. Major reminds you: lunch money? You nod your head, annoyed that he’d stopped giving you money for lunch, and say, OK $50 and start to write the number five down, and Major stops you by putting his hand on the withdrawal slip. You look up at him wondering what’s wrong, and begin to say the numbers out loud to prove you could do that simple math in your head. He tells you last week you deposited $309 (he assured you that you’d get what money they took away back next April), and only took out $40. If you take out $50 this week, you’ll have $219. The credit union requires a $30 minimum to maintain the account, so that leaves about $190. It’s actually $189, you say. Major nods. He looks up at the teller, at the folks piling into the credit union during their lunch hour, and then off into space in the way that he does so often when he’s trying to say something that it annoys you to no end. You break into the stare and say yeh, so what? And he turns to you and says, what if he paid you back $250 next week when his paycheck comes? You know, like an interest loan?
What do you say?
He spills into your silence to explain that he had to help Weesie with her insurance payments, and a neighbor had come by with a plate of greens, fried chicken, and cornbread and asked to borrow some money so her lights would stay on, and just this Monday the oil light on the car and the check engine light came on, and he looked up and just like that he just needed this little bit to make it to next week.
What do you say?
He said so then, you’d withdraw $239, and it’ll be like you didn’t have to take out any money for yourself this weekend, because you’ll get that back plus more. He looked up to the ceiling lights and started whispering numbers, suggesting he was doing the math in his head.
Just like that, your account is empty again. Slowly, you write $239 and sign your name and you and Major walk slowly to the teller window. She smiles at you, not smiling. Major laugh-talks in the way he does when he’s nervous trying to explain you have a “big purchase” this week. Major pats you on the shoulder. You ignore him and dig around in the candy dish looking for a Cream Soda DumDum. Any small joy. The bank teller doesn’t know who to hand the money to, and so Major reaches out his hand, counts to $50 and hands you the bills, then puts the rest in his pocket. He push-taps you towards the door and you drag your feet behind him back to the car. Before he turns on NPR, he reminds you next week you’ll have it back, with interest, he promises. Did you want him to hold onto your $50 until you got home so you knew it would be safe? You shake your head.
It took you longer than you thought it would to get back to the DHEC building. Now that you’re already late, what good is fussing to be only 10 minutes late vs any other time digit?
When you get on the elevator you press the third floor button. As the elevator climbs, you smell the cleaning solution wafting through the elevator shaft, and you’d almost sprint into the hallway if you didn’t know that the floor would be wet. But you knew that Tony always kept one side un- mopped until one side dried, so you looked for where the WET FLOOR sign was not and sprinted towards the body bent over the mop handle. He didn’t hear you call his name when you got out of the elevator because he had his headphones in. Just as he was about to lift the mop into the bucket you run up between his mop and the bucket and wave your hands. Tony’s smile is so big, he moves to take off his headphones and says he thought you had left him, Young Gun. You shake your head no, no. You shake your head no.
He says he has something for you, and reaches into his vest pocket. He said he kept it here because he thought that maybe eventually he’d run into you. It’s a little notebook, like what you get at Bi-LO in the stationery section or a gas station. He says he saw you writing in a notebook once on lunch break, and figured with your new music maybe one day you’d write songs, that he thinks you’re going to be famous, a big big deal.
And you don’t know why, but you felt your ears go hot, and your chest tighten like you were about to cry.
Tony asks you what’s wrong Young Gun? And you just shake your head. And move in to hug him, and you feel him tense up, then relax, then pat your back and say it’s OK it’s OK why are you crying Young Gun? It’s OK. He starts reaching for reasons you might cry: is this about the CD’s? Something happen to them? It’s OK Young Gun, they can be replaced, it’s OK. You hug him tighter, and run your fingers along the spirals of the notebooks. You tell him it’s all gone. So many folks only just take take take take from you. He asks takes what?
You say everything.
Photo credit: Henry Jones Photography
Contributor Notes
DéLana R.A. Dameron is the author of two poetry collections, Weary Kingdom (2017) and How God Ends Us (2009). Her short story “WORK” is part of a larger project Redwood Court, exploring the suburban Black South at the intersection of the end of the 20th century, and the beginning of the 21st. Dameron holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from New York University where she was a Goldwater Hospital Writer’s workshop fellow, and was named the 2018 Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. Dameron has had essays, interviews, and poems published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Catapult, Southern Cultures, BUZZFEED, ARTS.BLACK, Storyscape Journal, The Rumpus, Epiphany Magazine, the Tidal Basin Review, African American Review, The New Sound Journal, the Academy of American Poets, among others.
