If I had never been cursed with light skin, my little brother and I might not have ever figured out how to be the best boosters in town. Now, some people would say our subsequent good fortune makes the curse a blessing, but those folks must not drink lemonade. Either that or they buy their lemonade in a bottle and never saw their Granny Liz crush a lemon in her palm until the last drop was dropped. And I’m not just bringing up lemonade because people call me yellow. I bring it up because a lemon is godawful bitter, which is how (I’m told) some light girls can be, ensuring their family’s bright yellow preservation by turning off all the would-be tasters. Good thing my Mama nicknamed me Sugar, which was my first clue as to what to do with this curse.
I found the second clue after my little brother sat crying on the curb outside of Friendly’s Food Mart, which, if you ask me, is the worst name for a shop with that kind of owner. Mama had sent us to the corner store to get some eggs for her potato salad and, at nine and seven, we felt grown. Daddy had given us a five-dollar bill and said, “Keep the change,” and so we spent most of the long walk doing the math to figure out how much candy we could get with three dollars. At nine and seven, the little candy shelf beneath the register may as well have been Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. In the space between us, we played Tetris with our imagined candy, mentally splitting a pack of Rolos (the most expensive must-have on the list) and stacking Laffy Taffy’s, Nowlaters (officially named Now & Laters, but that’s not what we called them), and Bubble Yum on top. We didn’t feel the sun beating down on our heads on the way there; the promise of candy covered us in cool shade.
By the time we opened the door and felt the artificial air blow on our faces, we could practically taste all the sugar Daddy said would rot our teeth. He was the kind of dentist who said “Just call me Sam,” and played his keyboard at schools where he rapped about brushing teeth.
Just as soon as Sweet spotted the candy shelf and beamed a toothless grin, Mr. Friendly (I never learned his name) barked, “One kid at a time!” But he was only looking at my little brother.
You need to know a little more about the curse. It wasn’t just the color; it was being the only one in the family that color. You know how it is with us. Even in genetics, white folks still whitin’, hiding scared and waiting to attack. They might lurk around for a generation or two before pouncing on a family that didn’t ask to be pounced on, threatening to mess up the family photo since the fake photographers at Sears (just sales clerks who press buttons) tend to adjust the lights for the closest-to-white, throwing my features into focus while casting my mother, father, and brother in shadow. “The ways of this world…” is what my grandfather sighs before he turns the page of his newspaper to read about more than war.
Our first Sears photos were our last. When Daddy wouldn’t take them back (Is it worth the hassle, Shirley?), Mama marched into and through the store, my brother holding her hand and me following close behind. We got to the counter where the same button pusher who had taken our photos weeks ago just happened to be on duty, which seemed to make Mama madder than relieved. The few customers in the studio did the Red Sea Slide, letting my Mama and her people through as if her righteous anger was a sign from God.
She pulled out the eight by ten; her fingertip was a bright red nail holding the picture in place. “What do you notice about this picture?” Mama asked in her schoolteacher way.
“Ma’am, you’re obviously up…”
“I said what. Do. You. Notice?” Her last “notice” was softer, that trick teachers pull when they are asking you if you’d like them to call your mother and they know you ain’t allowed to say, “Hell naw!”
“I’m not sure what I should notice, Ma’am.”
“I’ll help you. Look at my face.” When the button pusher hesitated, Mama quipped, “Look up!”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Do I have moles?” Mama asked, and the button pusher glanced furtively at the other customers as if asking someone to throw her a life raft. It was a simple enough question to me, one I could have answered with my eyes closed because I could still remember the days when Mama used to kiss my face while I read her moles like Braille, my pudgy fingers tracing her skin and asking where it hurt. Those were the last of my lap days, before the faces people made at my brother made that space his refuge.
Nobody saved Button Pusher. Instead, people got really interested in their cuticles or either started looking for that last piece of gum they knew they had in their purses. “Yes, ma’am. It appears you do.”
“It appears,” Mama snapped, mocking Button Pusher. “Does it appear that I have moles in this photo?” Mama nodded at the dark faces beneath her red fingernail, so dark, in fact, that the only features you could actually see were their eyes and teeth. I tried to swallow the lump that was building in my throat. I prayed, Just say sorry. Just say sorry. Just say sorry. I want to go home.
“It does not. But ma’am, I hope you understand that it was very difficult to light such a...” She hesitated. “…range…of…ah…complexions. I had to adjust…”
“For her?” my mother asked incredulously, jerking her thumb back to point at what briefly felt like nobody’s child.
“Well, ma’am, she would have been washed out if…”
Mama changed her voice so that she sounded eerily cheery; it was the kind of mismatch between emotion and tone that would make a lesser woman pee on herself. “Do you mean to tell me that you decided to sacrifice three fourths of a family so that one child’s eyelashes could come into brilliant focus?”
“Well, um… That’s not what I… I can call…um, my manager if you are unhappy with the results.”
“I am more than unhappy with the results.” Mama was putting on that school teacher magic, her elocution crisp. I knew she was about to pull out a dictionary word which was her way when talking to white people. It was like the reverse of the “native” documentaries they showed us at school. Where the white travelers simplified their sentences and spoke louder to the natives, as if the sound barrier and not the language barrier was the problem, Mama’s voice lowered the angrier she got, and she began to use words we didn’t have much use for at home. “I am absolutely livid. I cannot believe that you would have the nerve, the audacity, or the unmitigated gall to treat a family this way.”
She pulled me to her. I winced. She draped an arm around my shoulder and I began to breathe.
“This is my daughter. This is my son. All three of us have the same nose. Look at the shapes of our eyes. Hers are shaped like her father’s. His, like mine. He has my cheekbones. She has my chin. As they grow, the structures of their faces may change, throwing even more similarities into relief. They may feel an urge to consult our family photo albums to compare their new faces to the younger versions of their parents.” She was speaking so softly now that Button Pusher had to lean in a little, a puppy waiting for directions or a treat. “And should they happen to consult this particular photo, they may discover that THEIR PARENTS HAVE NO FACES!”
I jumped. My brother jumped. Button Pusher jumped. She sprung into action. She grabbed the phone and began to dial furiously, her fingers fumbling over four numbers. She hung up and tried again. “Ma’am, I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry. I’m calling my manager. He will get you a refund. I’m so very sorry.” She started to cry.
Mama said white tears taste like Koolaid. She said her own mother, Granny Liz, got immune to them when she was working for the Washington’s and the “lady” of the house would try to use them every time she asserted her right to go home and be with her own children before the hoot owl started hunting. The day Mama told me that story, she said Granny Liz had passed down her immunity to my mother and she was passing it down to me. She said some white women turn on the water works because they are allergic to responsibility. She told me not to be fooled; “Don’t imagine that those kinds of tears are as bitter as ours. Imagine that they taste like Koolaid.” I wondered what kind. I hoped grape.
I’d just set my sights on the grape Nowlaters when Mr. Friendly barked at my brother. Sweet jumped. He repeated, “One kid at a time?” cocking his head to the side like it didn’t make any sense.
“That’s what I said, right?” he yelled.
“Hey, you can’t talk to us like that! We just kids!” He looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. That was my first clue to our later fortune. Invisibility can be the sugar you need to turn lemons into lemonade. My brother’s tears were the water. They sprung up in his eyes immediately, the body’s shocked response. The kind of people we hung around didn’t talk to him like that on account of he had really, really long eyelashes and an easy smile and pretty skin and some lady at church was always asking him about school and sneaking him peppermints and calling him too pretty for a boy in a way that didn’t mean “too” anything, but just right. It was the church ladies that nicknamed him “Sweet Baby” for the way he warmed up to all that attention when he was little, blowing spit bubbles and waving at anybody whose attention he could steal from the hoopin’ pastor.
When he turned five, he decided he didn’t like the baby part so much, so one morning he told our Sunday School teacher, “Sweet Baby is not my real name. My real name is Sweet.” She cracked up for what seemed like ten minutes, then said, “Well, Sweet it is.” Between Sunday School and morning service, she made it her business to pass around Sweet’s new name and nobody protested. Deacon Freeman said, “A man…” He looked at me, cuz me and Sweet was joined at the hip. “...or a woman, ought to have the right to choose they own name.” He winked. “More than once, I hope.”
But this wasn’t church. Which was a surprise to me because Mr. Friendly was brown. I just figured all brown people went to Baptist churches named after some hill, grove, or mountain. My brother’s tears were contagious and when they spread to me, they became prisms through which I saw Mr. Friendly’s differences for the first time. His not-like-us-at-all-ness.
Mr. Friendly was lighter than my brother, but darker than me. I’d been so used to making quick decisions about danger or safety by skin color that I hadn’t bothered to notice the rest.
Through my “don’t-you-dare-fall” tears, I noticed Mr. Friendly had hair like Deacon Long, who Daddy said thought he was cute “cuzza them plantation curls.” I noticed the fat man on the store’s counter, the Buddha Daddy told me about when he was explaining how religions are just the different languages people use to name the God force. Mama had quipped, “My God’s name is Jesus,” and Daddy had muttered, “Don’t we know it.”
Last thing I noticed was Mr. Friendly’s clothes, the way he didn’t seem to give a damn what matched and what didn’t, or that little girls shouldn’t have to look at chest hair since the seventies ended two years ago. I was suddenly clear. Mr. Friendly was one of the people whose “why can’t you all get it together” advice for Black people seemed to piss Daddy off almost as much as white folks’. “Come over here and get all this loan money with no questions asked and got the nerve to try to tell me some shit about boot straps. People ought to have to learn the unofficial version of things before they get they papers. You think they gave us boots when they brought us here to work for free?” I noticed the way Mr. Friendly looked at my little brother as if part of the citizenship test was to sneer like a white man. The bell clanged on our way out.
We walked further away from the store and sat on the curb to catch our breath. I put a hand around my brother’s shoulder but he was getting too big to lean in. “Don’t cry,” I said, sounding like Daddy, gentle.
“Ain’t nobody crying!” Sweet said, melancholy. A Mama word. “Fuck that candy,”he said.
I told myself it was the candy he was crying about and not the shock of white sentiment in a brown face. I stood up. If we had to walk home empty-handed, we may’swell practice cussing. “Fuck that nigga.” “Bitch-ass nigga.” He took the first steps for what suddenly seemed like a long trek. “Ole punk-ass bitch.” “Butt-face.” We laughed. It was time to elevate to the descriptive phase. “Ole block-head bitch.” I said, not really remembering the shape of his head, just the way his mouth curled like a Nike swoop when he looked at my brother. “Long head, little body bitch.” Now we were in the opposites phase. “Fat nose, skinny lip bitch.” “Pee teeth, dooty breath bitch,” Sweet said, potty talk being his favorite.
By the time we got home, we’d called Mr. Friendly everything but a child of God, as Grandma Sandy would say.
I opened the front door and immediately smelled the celery Mama was cutting up.
“You got my eggs?” she asked over her shoulder. When we didn’t answer, she turned around and looked at my hands, then Sweet’s, then back at mine. She had a knife in her right hand. I lost my voice.
“Mama this ole triangle-mustache, circle belly bit… ter man gon tell us we can’t come in the store! Well, actually he said only one of us could come but I could tell he was talking about me stayin’ outside,” Sweet said, throwing himself at Mama, unafraid of getting cut.
I kept my eyes on the knife and talked fast, “And Mama you said not to go nowhere my brother ain’t welcome like when Sandy mama said I could come play but Sweet couldn’t because he played too rough and you said the only thing rough was her dry ass heels…”
“Watch your mouth!”
“… and then you said Sandy can come over here but I can’t go over there and this man was even worse than Sandy mama cuz at least Sandy mama wasn’t looking at Sweet like he stepped in some dog sh… doo doo and this man looked at Sweet like he was the dog doo doo and I remember you said don’t spend no black money in a place that wants our money but not our skin because all money in this country was made on our skin so I didn’t want to spend our skin even though you really needed some eggs…” I took a breath. “I’m sorry.”
Sweet looked up from Mama’s belly as if to say, “What you sorry for?” but I had been born two years before him and I had memories from before he could even make ‘em and I remembered how he came by his name, how sweet and pretty he was with his slobbery self-- so pretty, I put down my own dolls and played with him instead. Besides, I had spent much more time studying our mother’s face, watching it crumble when people praised me for my plantation skin and ignored the fact that he had the face my parents imagined when they chose each other. So I guess I’m saying I used to walk around sorry for other people’s eyes. This was the last day I would need to.
Mama put the knife in the sink. She dropped to one knee, held my chin, the chin we shared. “You don’t have to apologize for the ways of other people even when they favor you. You understand me? You don’t have nothing to be sorry about.” I nodded.
“SAMUEL!” Mama yelled in that tone that let Daddy know he probably needed to answer in person.
“What happened?” He ran up the stairs. He looked back and forth between me and Sweet. “Y’all okay? Something happen?”
Mama answered him. “This motherfucker gon’ tell my kids they can’t come in the store together. Have you ever seen a sign that says one child only?” She answered herself. “I ain’t seen a sign. Sides, anybody with a heart can see they too young to be anywhere alone, even for a minute. Specially with everything that happened in Atlanta. Gon’ have my baby out there sitting on the curb so any Klansman with a itch for Black blood can just pull up and take him while Sugar looks around his ol’ nasty, disorganized store trying to find the eggs by the socks or wherever he decided to put ‘em this week with his triflin’, heartless ass. Fucking with my kids.”
“Be cool, Shirley.” Daddy said, while grabbing his keys from the hook by the door. “We got this.”
“Good Black, bad Black?” Mama asked, and I saw something like mischief in her eyes. She went to the sink and washed her hands. She grabbed her big purse.
“You know it,” Daddy said.
Sweet said, “Can we stay here?”
“Naw,” Daddy said. “You gotta learn this.”
These were the instructions we received on the way to take care of Mr. Friendly:
1. Watch Mr. Friendly’s hands. If they ever go below the counter, run.
2. Wait until Mr. Friendly is doing the cat-eye wall clock move with his head, and then…
3. Grab any candy we want, but don’t get greedy. Don’t get more than two of each thing so when he’s counting at the end of the day, he won’t put two and two together.
4. Drop the candy into Mama’s big leather purse, which she will drop right before they go into “good Black, bad Black.”
5. You can’t go to hell for stealing when you are the one who’s been stolen, especially if you’re taking from somebody trying to resent you for being stolen in the first place, which is the only time it’s acceptable to take. It’s not even stealing then; it’s reparations. Grandma Sandy’s Thanksgiving silver from before the Civil War is reparations too and there can never be enough.
6. All white people don’t hate Black people, but anybody who does hate Black people, no matter they color, is white. Yes, even high yella Sister Johnson.
7. Listen for the code phrase: “It’s not even worth it.” Then stop whatever you are doing and look regular. When Mama says, “Let’s go now,” walk out. She will grab the bag.
We repeated the steps back to Mama and Daddy as they pulled up in front of Friendly’s. They said we weren’t going in until we got those goofy looks off our faces. We tried, but every time me and Sweet looked at each other, we’d bust out laughing.
Daddy said, “Come on, now Sugar and Sweet. The longer we out here, the more suspicious we look and the less likely we are to get y’alls candy.” That shut us up real quick. We got downright sober.
“It’s on,” Mama said, stepping out and closing the door. We followed. She pushed the door so hard I thought the bell would fall off.
“Who was it? Was it this man?” Momma asked, pointing at Mr. Friendly. Sweet nodded.
“Stephanie, I’ll handle it,” Daddy said, in his talking-to-white-folks voice. Who was Stephanie?
“What can I do for you?” Mr. Friendly asked my father, all smiles now that grownups was in front of him.
“My wife is under the impression…”
Mama interrupted him. “You gon apologize to my kids for your little racist-ass comment.” She dropped her purse right in front of the candy shelf, then placed one hand flat on the counter, her other fist on her hip, and leaned in. I looked at Mr. Friendly. He crossed his arms. We wouldn’t have to run.
“What she means is…” Daddy interrupted, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“You tell my son he couldn’t come into this piece of shit store?”
“I only said one child…”
“Motherfucka, would you leave your seven year old son outside a store?”
“Cynthia, I’ve got this. Mr. ahhh” Daddy said, inviting Mr. Friendly to share his name. He only stared.
“Mr. Motherfuckin kick a kid to the curb, that’s his name. Would you leave your baby boy outside?” Mama was getting louder, not at all like she had talked in Sears.
“Sandra, I’m certain there was a misunderstanding. Right, sir?” Daddy stepped in front of Mama, giving Mr. Friendly the break he needed to get a word in.
“Unsupervised children…”
“Supervised? SUPERVISED? They ain’t at work! Why the fuck should my kids be supervised in their own neighborhood? Do they need a…”
“Sylvia, calm down, please.”
“…overseer? Huh, motherfucka? Have you heard of a patteroller?”
“Sophia…”
“Have you heard of Atlanta?”
“Sir, I’m sure we can…” Daddy said.
“Did you read about those kids in your motherfuckin New York Times?” Mama picked up one of the copies of Times on the counter and waved it around like a punctuation dance.
“Sir, what my wife is trying to say…”
“I’m saying what I’m trying to say. FUCKIN apologize!” She pointed the now-folded paper at Mr. Friendly.
“Susan, this is unnecessary.” Daddy moved a little to Mama’s right, as if to avoid getting hit by the swinging paper. “Mr. Johnson,” Daddy named him, “we want to support your…” Mr. Friendly looked toward the calmer of my two parents. I knew what Daddy was doing. He was playing the pitiful presidents game. Andrew Johnson took back Lincoln’s promise of 40 acres and a mule. Lyndon B. Johnson sent a whole lot of people’s kids to Vietnam.
“I don’t want to support shit!” Mr. Friendly turned to Mama, the growing distance between her and Daddy making it impossible for anyone to fix a gaze on both at the same time.
“…nascent business, but…” He looked at Daddy. One more head turn and he’d officially be a cat-eyed wall clock.
“You in a Black goddamn neighborhood!” Mr. Friendly looked at Mama. It was on. Sweet nodded at me.
“Mr. Harding,” Daddy said. “What we want…” I got two grape packs of Nowlaters. When people found out President Harding was Black, he had to pretend like he didn’t know us so he didn’t do anything to make people stop lynching Black folks. And that’s even after he met with Ida B. Wells!
“You ought to know the people you getting’ money from!” Mama’s pitch was at a frenzied high. She was still pointing. Sweet got a handful of Bubble Yum.
“…is the same level of respect…” Daddy said. I dropped two packs of Rolos in Mama’s purse.
“Did you tell my son to stay his Black ass on the corner?” Sweet dropped two Snickers bars.
“I never…” Mr. Friendly stepped back and showed his palms, a gesture of peace. I almost felt sorry for him. But it didn’t stop me from grabbing some Skittles.
“…afforded to your other customers, Mr. Jefferson.” Mr. Friendly crossed his arms again, too confused to notice Daddy naming Presidents. Thomas Jefferson was a ole blockhead coward who got talked into erasing the part about freeing us from the Declaration of Independence. Guess his mama never asked him if he would jump off a bridge just because his friends told him to.
“If my motherfuckin kids ever give you a reason to think they need some motherfuckin supervision...” Reese Cups.
“Given that you are also a minority, Mr. Jackson, …” M&Ms. Andrew Jackson was a triangle head murderer who dropped a bomb on a maroon colony in Florida and killed a whole bunch of families.
“… you call me. Mr. Crocker owned this store before you and he loved my kids!” I liked Mr. Crocker. He gave us free penny candy and told us stories about the Negro Leagues. We was all sad when he hit the lottery and moved to Ghana.
“…I’m sure you understand that there are certain prejudices, Mr. Roosevelt…” Pop Rocks. Theodore Roosevelt messed over Cuba and killed a bunch of people when he moved in on them after they fought off the Spanish. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt refused to help out the people who worked in white folks’ houses like my Granny Liz, so it was kind of like she’d already paid for the candy we were getting.
“You know WHY he had to leave?” Laffy Taffy. Was she going to talk about the lottery?
“… to which we are all subject at one point or another…” Ring Pops.
“Because these racist motherfuckas…” Big League Chew.
“…given these tense political times.” Reese’s Pieces.
“…wouldn’t offer him the loan they offered you!” More Skittles. I made a note to ask Mama what the rules for telling tales was now that we knew the rules for reparations.
“Mr. Monroe, we’d hoped to come…”Sweet Tarts. The Monroe Doctrine is named after this dumbass who made it okay for people to go into people’s countries and kill a bunch of people and take over.
“You only get to be a shitty businessman…” Appleheads.
“…to some kind of agreement…” Grapeheads.
“Because WE are the nigga class…” Gummy Bears.
“…because minorities should stick together.” Gummy Worms.
“…that makes yo triflin ass seem safe!” Hubba Bubba.
“Although minority is actually a misnomer, Mr. Polk,” Wrigley’s Spearmint. James Polk, who looked like his mama and daddy was cousins, started the Mexican War. Mama said don’t listen to nobody talkin about Mexicans takin American jobs when America took half they whole damn country.
“My two beautiful children…” Juicy Fruit.
“…since we do comprise three fourths of the global population.” Almond Joy.
“…came in here to spend money in this raggedy motherFUCKA.” Smarties.
“Mr. Arthur, I can imagine your own wife might be…” 100 Grand. President Arthur had a weird beard and didn’t even do nothing for us when he got to be President even though he was an abolitionist before. There was a convention right here in Louisville where we got together to say why he was a low down dirty dog who turned his back on us.
“We spend money in this neighborhood…” Lemonheads.
“… very upset if your children were ever discriminated against…” Starburst. That was all the candy we wanted.
“…and as long as you in this neighborhood…” My mouth watered.
“…for the color of their skin.” Sweet leaned his head against Mama, letting her know we were finished.
“…you will RESPECT the money….”
“I do believe, Mr. Hayes…” President Hayes looked dirty and he was the one who took the Union troops out of the South and didn’t even care about all the Black people who were going to get lynched and murdered because of it.
“…that make sure YO ass pays the motherfuckin rent on this raggedy shit!” Mama bent to pick up her purse. She strained a bit under its new weight.
“…that one day very soon, we will…”
“You know what, Larry? It’s not even worth it.” Mama turned to Daddy right before he broke into singing, “We Shall Overcome.” She stormed out of the store. Sweet followed. Daddy’s feet were planted, so I stayed put. I inched closer to him.
“… bridge the gap between us. As a sign of faith in your willingness to change, I’d like to purchase something from your fine establishment, Mr. Washington. How much for the newspaper my wife accidentally carried out in her haste?” George Washington wore too much blush and held over two hundred Black people (Mama and Daddy said don’t ever say owned because you can’t own a person) against their will. And you know what? He didn’t even brush his damn teeth. Lost ‘em all, like Daddy said we liable to do if we keep up with our candy jones. And when Washington was as toothless as a newborn baby, he pulled the teeth of one of the Black men who lived on his plantation.
Mr. Friendly don’t know these facts. That’s why he sputtered, “I… I don’t have anything against your kind…
“I’m sure,” Daddy said, thumping two dollar bills on the counter and turning on his heels. “Enjoy the rest of your day, Mr. Reagan.” Mama always said don’t say that man’s name around her unless it was a synonym for “motherfucka” and me and Sweet wasn’t allowed to say that word in the house. President Motherfucka made up the Black welfare queen even though his own Mama was on welfare because his drunk-ass daddy couldn’t keep a job. Least that’s what Mama said on the phone one day when I wasn’t supposed to be listening.
I got in the back seat next to Sweet.
“Y’all ain’t get no Blow Pops?” Mama said, rifling through her purse.
Daddy said, “Then the motherfucka gon say ‘your kind.’”
“Simple motherfucka,” Mama said.
Sweet said, “Are y’all talking about the president again?” Eyes all big, green juice from the apple-flavored Laffy Taffy dripping down his chin.
Daddy pulled off and headed toward the West End to the grocery store the pastor’s daughter owned. Mama turned around and handed me a pack of Rolos, which she knows are my favorite because she must watch my face as closely as I watch hers. “Listen to me.”
“Yes ma’am,” we said quickly and in unison because we had just witnessed all the reasons we would be fools not to.
“Don’t you ever feel bad for a property crime against someone who puts the protection of property over human life. You hear me?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Ain’t no such thing as property. That shit is made up.”
“Shol is,” Daddy said, stroking his beard and looking serious in the rear view mirror. “You can possess but you sho can’t own nothing but your Black-ass mind.”
“And if you ain’t careful, somebody can take possession of that.” Mama chimed in, popping a Nowlater in her mouth.
“Aliens?” Sweet asked, eyes huge like the days when he was my living doll.
So that’s the short of how me and Sweet got on our way to becoming the best boosters in the city of Louisville. Cuz if you don’t “allow” me or my brother, you must believe we need your permission. And like my Mama always says, “Sometimes people are just begging to learn how free I am.”
Contributor’s Notes
Asha L. French is a writer from Louisville, KY who publishes across genres. She has published poems and essays in Pluck!, Warpland, Blackbone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, Emory Magazine, Ebony, and the New York Times. Asha is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University, and her current project explores methods of emancipation in the writing of Toni Cade Bambara.
