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Angela Jackson is an award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright who has published three chapbooks, four volumes of poetry, and served as the fifth Poet Laureate of Illinois. Born in Greenville, Mississippi, and raised on Chicago's South Side, Angela Jackson was educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Her most recent accomplishments include: her appointment as the fifth Poet Laureate of Illinois, the 2022 Black Excellence Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black Ensemble Theater, and a Poetry Foundation 2022 Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement award for poetry. Jackson’s most recent publication is a collection of poems,  More Than Meat and Raiment , which came out in 2023.  Her other collections of poetry include Voo Doo/Love Magic  (1974); Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners  (1993) which was awarded the Carl Sandburg Award and the Chicago Sun-Times/Friends of Literature Book of the Year Award; And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New  (1998), nominated for the National Book Award, and It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time  (2015) that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Open Book Award, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the Milt Kessler Poetry Prize. She received a Pushcart Prize and an American Book Award for Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E  (1985). Jackson has also written several plays, including Witness!  (1978), Shango Diaspora: An African American Myth of Womanhood and Love (1980), and Comfort Stew (2019). Her first novel, Where I Must Go (2009), won the American Book Award. Its highly anticipated sequel, Roads, Where There Are No Roads  (2017), won the 2018 John Gardner Fiction prize. She is also the author of the significant biography A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life and Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks. She has received the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, TriQuarterly’s Daniel Curley Award, Illinois Center for the Book Heritage Award, Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Fuller Award, Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent from Chicago State University, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. She was a twenty-year member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writers Workshop, succeeding the late Hoyt W. Fuller as its Chair. Her poetry and fiction have been published in many journals and anthologies. For Our People        Homage to Margaret Walker, "For My People" (1942) for our people everywhere singing their gospels and their rap, their blues, R&B, and their jazz, their soul and their neo soul, all great Black music, scuffling, scrimping, struggling to get by, for our people working as wage slaves, in collars blue, white, and pink, doing the best they can with what they have, hoping it will not be taken away with a pink slip, a sudden slip from a parapet, on cement into disability or welfare, or not, hustling to keep from being crushed on the unemployment line for our people for the way of years sipping summer from a tall glass of ice water, buttermilk and cornbread out of a mayonnaise jar, years testing watermelon, cutting s plug of sweetness, knocking on the round or oblong to listen to the taste, for the excellence of young boys running like they stole something but only owing themselves and the strength in their legs and girls who could keep up before breast held them back for our people and red Kool-Aid days, for smothered chicken and our cries smothered in a world that did not adore us, but ignored us or worse and ran us back on the other side of the viaduct where we belonged, not in the wild world we could conquer or excel in, given the gates opening and tools for redress for our people everywhere growing gardens on vacant lots, training roses and black-eyed susans and perennials in front yards, raking leaves and shoveling snow, scooping doo and picking up litter, washing and ironing out the wrinkles of everyday existence for our people running with nowhere to go, watching television and movies looking for ourselves, searching books and the nooks and crannies of history for a glimpse of what was waylaid, and what is to be, in barbershops and beauty parlors and ice cream parlors and the stone faces in funeral parlors, picking up children  from school from daycare, taking them to football, soccer, baseball, tennis, basketball, volleyball, having a ball at family reunions on Saturday nights for our people who came in chains tortured over turbulent waves, broken hearted, and broken tongued, and broken magic, broken bloodlines, strangled and whipped, distraught and driven to the edge of the mind and beyond for our people leaping to the sea, feeding sharks and myths and cautionary tales, surviving the journey to reach auction blocks a prurient pedestal for deposed queens, and chieftains, villagers humiliated, abused, raped, and riddled with misery into exquisite survivals, changing vocabulary and clothes, changing into sleek panthers and superheroes, making the world safe for demonstrations of protest and affection, all beauty and love, scapegoated, pilloried, denied the excellence we bring for our people grasping for gadgets and genuflecting to electric celebrity, worshipping trinkets and noisome symbols that blink and itch the eyes, gaming and gambling and laughing to keep from crying, and crying laughing, cracking up and falling out, drinking suicide, spilling milk and blood, gunned down under lampposts, in playgrounds, bloodied in drive-bys, in alleys, in living rooms, in bed sleeping for our people bludgeoned by police and each other, killed by presumptuous watchers, taxed for Black and driving while Black, shot in the back, falsely convicted, sentenced to dwell alone, and want to be redeemed, incarcerated in stone, tracked in department stores, harassed, stalked in malls, and all the places people spend and sell, our people selling loose squares, oils, socks and peanuts  on the corners of our desperate longing, for hair, for nails, for body graffiti for our people in the casinos, scheming in pennies from heaven with one-armed pirates, dreaming in die and cards and  dealers, dreaming numbers and playing them till they hit, for our people drowning in spirits, burning throats and pockets losing it all, spoiling livers, lungs, and kidneys, hearts with too much, each of us addicted to drugs of fashion, to ancient hurt, choosing crabs in a barrel or lifting as we climb, each one teach one for our people who do not belong to me but to all of us for we belong to each other, must hold each other in heart and mind for our people in the citadels of learning and the one-room schoolhouse, in the storefronts of funeral-parlor fans and the cathedrals of painted windows and arched ceilings that lend toward sky for our people in the baptismal pool, in white robes on the edge of the river, for our people, chanting and praying and hoping for a sweeter brew to sip and savor let a new earth arise let justice pour like trembling rain and mercy prevail as plentiful fields let our strength be matched by vulnerable honesty of heart may resilience be our guide, for we will stumble and then will rise more able having fallen, more beautiful having met each other along the way as we lifted each other up, hero-people who go out of their way for love, and stay on the way of goodness let our people be the people who remember and believe that love is all our portions all our currencies and all are one, each of us injured or exalted, betrayer or  betrayed, muted and declamatory, all one, each of us all of us, each private star beloved in the universe, each of us creature of burdens and singing angel merged as one, alive and moving upward holding on and lifting this earth, our house, precious and precarious, and God be our witness between this gravity and this grace, hold tight and fly Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University. Published 2022 by TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Angela Jackson and Jae Nichelle on June 24, 2025. Thank you so much for sharing “For Our People” with us. What led you to expand the conversation that Margaret Walker started? How did you decide where to end? Margaret Walker was my Afro-American Literature professor at Northwestern. I was enraptured when she read “For My People” in class. It moved me, so I knew I would write something in response to it. Over forty years later, I wrote “For Our People.” My mother had recently died and I searched around inside myself for something to fill that big hole that her vacancy had left. I had to speak to something large. The largest thing I knew and loved was our people. I believed the Sixties had answered Walker’s “martial songs”. I had come to recognize from Cornell West that love is an active force and I wanted to add that to the conversation. And I wanted to open up the conversation to our planetary responsibility. And I had to end on hope, where I must live and end. Faith and love and hope. Your poetry has spanned decades, from Voo Doo/Love Magic in 1974 to More Than Meat and Raiment in 2022. How has your relationship with language, form, and purpose evolved over this time? I have always paid attention to the shape of my poems. How form and content intertwine. I find a poem to be an organic thing. It's an expression of its expression. It was in my most recent book, More Than Meat and Raiment , that I experimented with formal poetry. I wrote sonnets, villanelles (It took me ten years.), haiku, and sestina. I don’t know if I will continue in this vein. It depends on how I feel and how the poem speaks to me. Right now, I am interested in the Blues. We’ll see how the Blues plays out in the next book. How did you approach your role as the fifth Poet Laureate of Illinois, and what was your favorite achievement during your tenure? I saw myself as a servant of poetry for The People, and an inspiration. I modeled myself after Gwendolyn Brooks, the third Poet Laureate and first Black woman to serve as Poet Laureate of the great state of Illinois. I would nurture poetry in young people and people who were ignored. I have several favorite achievements. Like Ms. Brooks, I liked to give poetry prizes, but mine were of large sums as they were underwritten by people who supported me and had financial resources to show it.  My whole tenure as Poet Laureate was underwritten by the Community. The McKeevers and Madhbutis contributed to a stellar reading of women poets organized by Laura Kenton. The poets were Ana Castillo, Allison Joseph, Kelly Norman Ellis, Parneshia Jones, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, and me at Saint Benedict the African Church. That Faith Community was the source of my Laureateship funding beyond the state. It led to my fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and my project through it was Ambassadors of Poetry, younger talented poets who conducted residencies of two – five days throughout the state. Most significantly, I gave individual awards:  Dr. William Lawson and Mrs. Rosemary Lawson underwrote a $1,000 prize for undergraduate and graduate students. Dr. Cynthia Henderson and Mr. Prentiss Jackson underwrote a $1,000 prize for senior citizens over 70 years old. And Mr. George E. Jackson underwrote a $1,000 prize for high school seniors for a Woman of Admiration. I served as the final judge of these prizes, as well as the final judge of the Emerging Writers Contest sponsored by the State Librarian/Secretary of State. Your work—across poetry, fiction, and drama—often centers Black womanhood, myth, and spiritual inheritance. What draws you to these themes? I think it was the September 1968 poetry issue of Negro Digest that the classic poem “I Am a Black Woman” by Mari Evans graced the cover. That poem moved me as an announcement of my own identity. An awareness of our Black womanhood was common among young Black women. On college campuses, it was usual to see panels on “The Role of the Black Woman in the Revolution.” As a matter of fact, I wrote a series of vignettes with that title that was scheduled to appear in Black World Magazine in April 1976. But Black World was canceled that month, and my contribution to the early days of Black feminism went unrecorded. In Make/n My Music , a poem written in 1969 but not published until 1974, I talk about the transition from being a colored girl to a Black woman. In July 1968, I washed my hair and my Cousin Willie Mae sculpted it into an Afro never to see a straightening comb again and never to be relaxed. I have never abandoned my Black womanhood to try to please or appease anyone else. And I never will.  I always find something to explore in the experience of Black womanhood, for as someone once said, “When America catches a cold, Black America catches the flu.’ In addition, we have a rich legacy of creativity and the gift of laughter.  We sure need these attributes. I had a race consciousness in childhood,  but it was in my undergraduate years at Northwestern that I developed an interest in African mythology. In the Africana section of the NU library, I read about Shango and Obatala and other orisha. In 1977, at FESTAC 77 in Lagos, Nigeria, I began a series of poems about an African deity who would be Shango. This series ran the course of three years. In 1980, I transformed the poems into my play Shango Diaspora: An African-American Myth of Womanhood and Love. My sister Betty Jean and producer Woodie King had encouraged me to make that step into playwriting. In my latest book, More Than Meat and Raiment , I explored Hausa mythology. I used to read The City Where Men Are Mended to my summer high school students.  Wish Bone Wish is the story of two mothers and their kinds of love and the results of each. Love is the current that runs through my themes of Black womanhood, myth, and spiritual inheritance. I grew up on a street of churches. Next door was the Missionary Baptist Church, which I visited with my Baptist best friend Bunny. We had friends who belonged to the Pentecostal church a few doors down. We danced outside the open doors of the Sanctified church. But most of all, my family was devoutly Catholic. Our church was on the corner. But more than that, we were Christians. To be a follower of Christ is to be committed to love and social justice. My identity, interest in African myth, and spiritual inheritance are all rooted in love, the power of love. A love for all humankind, a recognition of the sacredness of each person, a faith in God, and my history has taught me the hope of something better. In a 2012 interview , you said your advice to young writers is “Don’t try to become a writer unless you have to. The most important things are to write and read and write and read and live and love and just try to tell the truth.” Why did you  have  to become a writer? As Robert Hayden wrote, “Know that love has chosen you.” I had no choice. I was chosen. I wanted to be a writer when I was ten. I was attracted to poetry the first time I read a poem in first grade. I wanted to be a writer like Jo in Little Women . But I wandered away after Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun . Then I wanted to be a doctor, and people approved. Chemistry and calculus cured me of that misconception. All I was compelled to do was write in my felt notebook and read Black poetry and other poetry. I went to OBAC, and the NU library had a poetry room where I cloistered myself for hours. There and Africana. My roommate, Roella Henderson, encouraged me to show my poems to Hoyt W. Fuller, editor of Negro Digest , soon to be Black World. He invited me to OBAC, where I might be judged by my peers. He considered Carolyn Rodgers, Don L. Lee, Johari Amini, and others my peers. OAC was a critical environment, but it was clear they had a mission. You often reference that much of your early work was shaped in the OBAC Writers Workshop. What influence did that community have on your artistic development and your worldview? I was shaped by the Organization of Black American Culture Writers Workshop’s goals and philosophy of creating work to, for, and from Black people in a critical environment in search of a Black Aesthetic. If you could make any activity an Olympic sport, what would you get a gold medal in? I would give Simone Biles a run for her money in grace, balance, and intricacy. How can people support you right now? People can buy my books and ask book clubs to feature my work. Ask me to do readings over Zoom. Support me for fellowships and awards. Name another Black woman writer people should know. People should know the young poet Imani Elizabeth Jackson. She has already been awarded the C.D. Wright Award, and she has published in Poetry . Her upcoming volume is Flag . Yes, she is my niece. Tara Betts has been around a while. Check her out in Break the Habit , and Refuse to Disappear . ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Tiezst “Tie” Taylor is a Disabled Black femme who is non-binary trans. They are a radical educator, artist-activist, poet, and storyteller. They have earned degrees in education (B.A. in the individualized major of Teaching for Social Justice, New York University & M.S.Ed in Elementary Education, University of Pennsylvania), and are a proponent of disability justice and abolitionist frameworks. Their work explores their experiences in surviving: Disability and severe mental illness; intergenerational trauma and poverty; and intersecting forms of oppression. They use their art and research to educate, heal, nurture, radicalize, and catalyze change for all marginalized peoples. Tiezst is an Emerge 2025 Fellow with San Francisco State University’s Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, where they are working on an essay for publication on the criminalization of mental illness as it intersects with Black woman / femme identity. They were a Spring 2024 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and a past awardee of the NYSCA/NYFA Artists with Disabilities Grant. Tie’s work appears or is upcoming in Lucky Jefferson , Querencia Press , Midway Journal , Shō Poetry Journal , and ANMLY . Follow Tiezst on Instagram @tiezst. High John [A Duplex] After Jericho Brown & Zora Neale Hurston We get few chances to escape this machine, Each generation of my kin bound. Each generation bound to food stamps. Grandfather a pimp, me a whore– we hustle. American hustle is our hoodoo, In dream realms I try to outpace struggle. I fight to pay rent even in my dreams, Penniless, I cannot afford peace. When peace has a price, life costs too much, Stability is too rich for my blood. My blood is rich with pestilent resilience: We blood rich // We blood rich // We prevail! When systems fail us, we invent our own– ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Ashlee Haze is a Telly Award-winning poet, librettist, and spoken word artist from Atlanta by way of Chicago. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine and numerous local publications. She is the host of Moderne Renaissance, an educational and cultural podcast for modern thinkers. Her sophomore book, SMOKE , was released in April of 2020, with a second edition published in May 2023. She has partnered with the Atlanta Opera for their 96-hour Opera Festival as a librettist for two consecutive years (2024-2025). Ashlee holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Georgia State University and spends her time innovating ways to tell the stories not often told. Sing One We Know - A Love Story after “Sparks” by Coldplay “Oh, b*tch! His name sounds like a character from a book!” My sister screeches as I tell her about the man who would unravel me and make light work of the process. A black architect named [redacted] ain’t something a girl from Chicago could even dream of, and there he was, with skin the color of sunburnt magnolia leaves and eyes I could make a home of. I’d read all the self-help books by the time he slid into my dm’s. I knew that after a woman leaves a toxic man, the universe eventually sends love. Do not assume it will stay forever. That is a novice mistake . Our first date occurred under serendipitous circumstances- a rare Friday when I was not on tour and he didn’t have the kids. I flew to Baltimore and he’d made the drive to meet me after the Friday DC traffic finally let up. After verifying that neither of us was catfishing the other and acknowledging the butterflies we kept tucked behind our teeth, we acted like we’d known each other for years. I don’t know if we fell into each other’s rhythm so easily because he’d been married before or because I spent my life (sub?)consciously rehearsing to be a wife. I do know that it felt right at the time. We had dinner and spent the night watching Insecure  and fighting sleep like it owed us money. The next morning, as we were headed to brunch he threw on his “we were here before Columbus” t-shirt along with his HBCU track jacket and I thought to myself this man may just well ruin me- and I may just well consent to the ruining. I remember exactly what he ordered for brunch- the brisket Benedict special and kale juice. I remember the songs he played on the way back to DC from Baltimore, as I sat, both fascinated with the technology of his Tesla and bent on not letting him think I was impressed. In hindsight, I regret the times I admitted to being impressed. I know now, though, that it was not my honesty to blame, but his cruelty. I wish more women understood that. I remember the movie we were late to and him falling asleep halfway through. I remember him waking only long enough to grab my hand, and how I swore the earth moved beneath my feet. I remember the drive downtown and the tour of his workspace. I remember him telling me the story of the time he was racially profiled in the local Walmart. I remember him holding my hand as we walked to my favorite bakery- a journey he’d make 3 times and never complain about. Even when there was no street parking and he would have to circle the block because the line was long. I remember us stuffing the cupcakes in our mouths as we rushed to get to the portrait museum before my flight. The kiss near the Michelle Obama portrait. The moment he insisted on taking a photo of me, the ride to the airport. Bracing myself to say goodbye. Our second date was more perfect than the last. He’d used a little clout from his government job to get us a top-floor room at the MGM Grand. He reluctantly valet-parked the Tesla and paid for the overpriced food at the casino. We people-watched and played roulette until we exhausted the money we were willing to lose. The next morning, he watched sports and did a little work while I packed and snuck off to take a toke of my vaporizer. We went to another movie and he fell asleep halfway through (this is a pattern). Then we co-worked at a bookstore until it was time for me to go back to the airport. He made me listen to New Orleans-based rappers all the way to DCA. I would have been hard-pressed to think of a better heaven than this. I recall the details so vividly because, of all the things I remember, I don’t recall him showing any signs of being cavalier or cold. That’s the part I think has been hardest for me to grasp. It’s not that I missed some signs - there truly weren’t any. On our third date, he made the trip from DC to Atlanta, having delayed his trip a day due to work, but still managed to arrive in time to celebrate his birthday with me. The winter hadn’t settled into Atlanta by then, but the rain seemed like it wouldn’t cease. I had a hole in the sunroof of my old Benz, and the poor man had to ride with his hood on. For a long time, I thought to myself, maybe that’s why he left . I later sold the car just to be sure. We ate at one of my favorite little black cafes where the brothas serve your pancakes and grits with a little Earth, Wind, and Fire. While we waited, he picked up a notebook. “Draw me a beach house,” I said. And right there, in a rainy cafe window, he sketched me a 2-balcony beach house a poet could write worlds in. Two of the young waiters looked on in awe, and I knew he was a man I could retire in a beach house with. Then, as if scripted, a woman in the corner approached the table, apologized for interrupting, and said how much she loved my work. The ground moved again for sure this time. The rest of the weekend went much like the others. A movie- only this time he managed to stay awake. Lunch and lounging around in the rainy afternoon. He made me watch a Chappelle comedy that night. I try not to hold that against him. Our last date, if you could call it that, was New Year’s Eve. He didn’t make plans, but I wanted to be close in case he did. Another mistake . I met him at work and we drove to look at a property he was interested in developing. The agent was late, which gave us more time to listen to our favorite Luther Vandross songs. While we were touring the site, my white manager sent me a passive-aggressive text with the intention of pulling me into her misery. I remember my blood boiling because I was being stressed by a manager at a $10.00/hr job while touring a property with my architect boyfriend. I’d be back to reality, soon enough. Why couldn’t she just let me have New Year’s? I’d lived in his world before- a world where your good government job afforded you luxury and brunch in the wealthy black parts of town. By the time we met, I had traded it for the uncertainty of art income and a simple life that sometimes included being underpaid at a part-time job with a white manager who’s all too eager to remind you who’s in charge. We ate at a suburban pasta place on the way back to DC and parted ways because it was his night to keep the kids. I rang in New Year’s without those eyes. That hurt more than I have ever cared to admit. Shortly after that, the good morning texts stopped. The nudge in the afternoon didn’t elicit a reply. Sending him an article on the weekly hot topic didn't make me any more visible. I tried to reason my way through it. I thought perhaps it was work. Or the distance. Maybe it was the hole in the sunroof. Or the part-time job. Or my weight. Or the age difference. Or the fact that I didn’t have kids. Or his mother’s illness. Perhaps he’d wooed another woman with that skin and decided he liked her better. Then, after a while, rage took the place of optimism and self-pity. Finally, I learned to accept the brutal truth. That he wasn’t being the man he said he was. He didn’t want to be that for me, and there was nothing I could do about it . His absence was intentional, the same way his presence had been. He simply didn’t want me anymore and couldn’t be bothered to say it. Nothing can adequately prepare you for the moment when someone you decide to love leaves without saying goodbye. Isn’t that what love is about, though? The risk of devastation? At some point, he apologized. I don’t know if it was because of guilt or convenience. Perhaps he was the first of us to need grace, and it will make sense when it’s my turn to get in line for a helping. What I know for sure is that this type of withdrawal can make you crazy. It can make you think you deserved it, or maybe you dreamed the whole relationship up. Maybe I am terrified that if I don’t document the collision, there will be no proof that we were there- that there were sparks, even if you can’t tell just by looking at the debris. These days, we are friends in the truest sense of the word. To be fair, he’s been present longer than he was gone, and that means something. Together, we are opening the gift of a new beginning. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t wonder what would have happened if he’d chosen me (that thought is a lot more fleeting now that the wound has healed). I am grateful for the time we had and for knowing that when the time comes, I want my beach house to have two balconies. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and more. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Soni Brown writes from the complicated spaces between countries, between family members who should love each other, between the person you were and who you're becoming. Raised in Jamaica and now splitting her time between Colorado and Montego Bay, she tackles the messy realities of identity, belonging, and family dynamics with unflinching honesty. She is querying her memoir about caring for a mother who abandoned her during childhood while asking brutal questions. What do we owe parents who discarded us? How do you heal from someone who can't even remember the harm they caused? An excerpt of the memoir will be included in an anthology of essays about adult child/parent estrangement, provisionally entitled  No Contact,  to be published by Catapult Publishing in 2026 and edited by Jenny Bartoy. Soni is a staff writer for Colorado State University Pueblo and a comic-memoir educator with Brink Literacy Project. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and earned fellowships from Tin House Summer Writing Workshop and Mendocino Writing Conference, plus a scholarship to PREE Writing Studio. Her essays and articles have found homes in places like Cosmopolitan , The Believer , Desert Companion , Sisters from AARP,   The New York Daily News , F(r)iction , and Africa is a Country . She wrote the screenplay for the documentary  Across the Tracks; A Las Vegas Westside Story. Her essay about leaving the United States for Jamaica after George Floyd's murder received notable mention in Best American Essays 2023 . She founded and facilitates the Papine Writing Collective, an online, do-it-yourself creative writing studio and community for emerging and mid-career writers from the Caribbean and its diaspora.  Haunted Paradise In Jamaica, we build shrines to our oppressors and call them tourist attractions. This thought occurred to me two years ago. I was driving from my home in town, passing the all-inclusive resorts that dot the highways of Montego Bay, on assignment for a travel magazine. I park outside the gate of Greenwood Great House. There’s a painted sign instructing visitors to “ring for service.” The ghosts of the past still demand we announce ourselves before entering.  A small woman appears to let me in, telling me “Mr. Bob busy but come.” I follow her down the winding path toward what was once a shrine to colonial power. To the left lies a fallow, fading garden where a carriage house peeks in and out of view. We emerge into what is situationally the backyard. Now it serves as the official entrance to this preserved piece of our painful history. What strikes me immediately is how ordinary this “Great House” feels—a structure that modern Montego Bay mansions easily rival in size and grandeur.  As I linger near the entrance, I notice a young family browsing the gift shop. I strike up a conversation with the wife hoping to get some pithy quote for my article. It’s a travel guide meant to attract Google's algorithm. My editor suggested a word-soup title: “Top Ten Reasons to Tour Jamaica's Plantation Homes Like a Native.” It's all kinds of wrong but I need a check. Living in Jamaica with North American tastes means constant compromise between my politics and my money.  The wife's expression mirrors my own internal struggle: curiosity about our past, anxiety about confronting it, and the desperate hope that somehow these preserved plantation homes might offer us resolution rather than just another sanitized narrative that erases our ancestors' suffering.  But resolution requires remembrance, and Jamaica has yet to build a single, significant memorial to the horrors that happened here. At least not on this side of the tourism corridor. Yet, here I am, part of the problem, preparing to write glossy copy that will bring more tourists to play golf and get served by people in colonial costumes. Greenwood’s owner, Bob Betton, is a Black. He returned to Jamaica after years working as a postman in the U.K. He greets our small tour group and explains how he acquired the property through serendipity. He got lost while driving one day and was mistaken for a taxi driver by Greenwood’s white owner. Bob gave him a lift to the house as an unexpected bond formed between them. Later, when the owner needed money, he offered to sell the property to Bob.   “When I bought this place in the seventies,” Bob tells me, “The white people renting the carriage houses out back accused me of being ‘a neyga man who wanted to punish them for slavery.’” It was a time of profound transition. Jamaica's socialist government had produced white flight. Families fled for Miami, fearing the country would follow Cuba's path to communism. Their exodus created space for Black political power. “All I wanted,” Bob says, gesturing at the polished woodwork, “was to turn this into a proper museum.” I nod, understanding what lay behind his words. This place, this “Great House,” represents both accomplishment and atrocity. A contradiction seen in its cut limestones quarried in England and shipped to the island.  As our tour begins, I notice how the young guide's narrative carefully navigates around the darker aspects of the plantation's past. We hear extensively about the Barrett-Brownings who lived here, their famous poet relative Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the European furniture painstakingly preserved in each room. When we reach the top floor, the guide proudly points out the spectacular view of the Caymanas Trench and remarks on how clearly you can see the curvature of the earth from this vantage point. Throughout the tour, slavery is mentioned only in passing—a footnote to the grander story of European achievement. When I ask direct questions about the enslaved people who made this house function, the guide shifts uncomfortably before sharing the plantation's most treasured myth. During the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, Greenwood was spared from burning because the owner was “a benevolent Master,” allowing his slaves to practice religion and learn to read. The story settles over our group like a thin blanket over a corpse. It technically covers the ugliness but does nothing to disguise its presence. *** Outside in the garden, I find myself wanting to feel satisfied with this nice version of history. The Christmas Rebellion—or Baptist War as some colonists called it—was one of the largest slave uprisings in the Caribbean. But what the tour and history books fail to mention is how women were instrumental in its organization, lighting fires across the island as signals for the rebellion to begin. The narrative centers men like Sam Sharpe while erasing figures like the unnamed woman who was the first person hanged for the uprising. According to records I've studied, her last words declared she acted so her children could be free. Where is her memorial? Where is the place that honors her sacrifice? I think about American plantations and their recent reckonings with the past—albeit imperfect ones. I remember the controversy when actors Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds held their wedding at Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina, celebrating their love in a place where hundreds had suffered and died in bondage. The backlash forced a public conversation about the ethics of using sites of historical trauma as picturesque backdrops for contemporary pleasure. Yet here in Jamaica, where most citizens are descendants of the enslaved, this conversation seems perpetually deferred. Instead, we adopted a slogan meant to attract corporations and foreign investors as our national ethos: “Out of Many; One People.” A comforting motto that erases centuries of exploitation with five simple words. I knew what this really meant—there is no distinguishing among the people who carries the legacy of enslaver and enslaved. We are all Jamaicans now. We had supposedly reconciled. Never mind the economic disparities that persist along color lines. Never mind that the descendants of the plantation owners still own the hills while the descendants of the enslaved clean their pools. This convenient mythology allows us to sidestep the uncomfortable work of confronting our history, replacing genuine reckoning with a marketable fiction that serves tourism brochures better than it serves justice. We've transformed plantations into tourist attractions where visitors can fall in love with the tropical vegetation and parrot our statement for casual indifference, “No problem, mon.” How long does a place remain hallowed because something horrific happened there? What does it mean when the descendants of the victims must serve as guides, smiling and recounting a history that erases their own ancestors' suffering? The past is not past. The dead are not dead. *** Years ago, when I worked as a flight attendant, I would greet tourists bound for Jamaica's golf resorts and all-inclusive getaways. Many of these paradise vacations were built on former plantations. Their names still proudly announce their heritage: Rose Hall Estate, Tryall Estate, Good Hope Estate. With a professional smile, I'd say, “Welcome aboard,” while silently thinking, “I hope my ancestors haunt you and you lose every damn bag and golf ball, maybe a limb.” The thought was petty, perhaps, but it was the only resistance I could offer to the ongoing commodification of my country's pain. Now I live in Montego Bay with my white husband and biracial daughters, and the contradictions of Jamaican society press in from all sides. The gated community near my children's school has become the social epicenter of our lives for playdates, birthday parties, and sleepovers. They all unfold behind those security checkpoints. There, I must show ID and submit to having my trunk searched a little too carefully. The guards are Black like me and seem to relish putting me in my place. Or perhaps that is the guilt I feel knowing that it is my kind that does this kind of work. The residents behind the gates are predominantly white or super light-skinned, their surnames appearing on company buildings and street signs throughout Montego Bay. Walking beside my husband through these spaces, I find myself deliberately leaving inches between us, embarrassed to hold his hand in public. My fingers twitch with the desire for connection but remain firmly at my side. I know why. I've fallen into the age-old trap that from the outside looks like self-hatred or, worse, the pan-Africanist who preaches Black love while partnered with a white man. I've researched the family I visit behind the Montego Bay gates, seeking to understand if they were among those who received compensation when slavery was abolished. Not the enslaved, mind you, but the enslavers, paid for their “loss of property.” I find some relief when I discover certain families arrived after emancipation, but the dynamics remain unchanged. I am still the Black woman dropping off her light-skinned children to play with white Jamaican children, a scene that has likely played out countless times on this very property over centuries. My illusion of equality shatters one evening at a "Paint and Sip" party hosted in one of these homes. A white European woman, whose accent betrays her rural origins but who has found unexpected status as an auteur in our color-conscious society, asks where I'm from. “Kencot in Kingston,” I reply. Without hesitation, she responds, “My maid is from Kencot.” In that moment, I understand that no matter how educated I am, no matter how “well-spoken” or professionally successful, to some, I will always be categorized alongside domestic workers. This is not because there's anything wrong with such honest work, but because in her mind, that is what Black Jamaican women are: helpers, servants, nannies, laborers who toil in the sun because as one Jamaican white woman told me, our black skin is better suited for work in the heat. The European with the maid from Kencot made her money in entertainment, appearing in music videos for reggae artists who need to fake foreign scenes. What fascinates me is how her whiteness alone grants her access to capital and social currency that would be unattainable otherwise. Her mannerisms—loud, brash, occasionally crude—would typically earn disapproval from Jamaicans if displayed by one of our own. Yet her pale skin functions as both shield and skeleton key, unlocking doors that remain firmly shut to locals despite generations of belonging. I recognize this dynamic because I live its mirror image: Jamaica-born but only welcomed into certain elite circles because I arrive on my white husband's arm. At these events, I become simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible—a Black curiosity granted temporary passage into spaces built on exclusion.  *** The next plantation on my journalistic tour is Bellefield Great House, home to the Kerr-Jarrett family for seven generations. Located in Granville, on the western outskirts of Montego Bay, the property manager proudly tells me that at one time, everything visible from the house to the sea belonged to the Kerr-Jarretts. Unlike the more ornate Greenwood, Bellefield has a utilitarian quality that supports what a member of the Jamaica Historical Society once told me. This structure was likely not the main Great House but rather housing for the head overseer, built close to the canefields and sugar mill for the convenience of management. The property manager is a woman about my age. She serves as my tour guide. I ask her directly, “What's it like to work at a place where people who looked like you and me suffered?” She pauses, considering her words carefully because she too needs a check. “More than likely somebody in my family worked here as a slave,” she admits. “When I was offered this job, I didn’t want it. But good work outside of call centers or hotels is hard to find in Montego Bay.” The call centers she mentions are themselves a creation of the Kerr-Jarrett family. They’ve introduced technological parks where multinational corporations can outsource their customer service operations to Jamaica's desperate workforce of high school and college graduates. The hotels, too, function as modern-day plantations with their six-day workweeks and below-industry wages. As we walk through the rooms, the property manager reveals darker aspects of life at Bellefield. “For the longest while, the family thought they were being poisoned by the slaves. They had a food taster,” she tells me. When family members died mysteriously, enslaved people were probably tortured and murdered in retribution. “It turns out the family was eating and drinking from lead plates and utensils,” she adds. I wondered aloud how many people paid for that mistake. At the sugar mill, a stone structure now picturesque with lichen and age is operating as a restaurant and bar. The menu is American food for a Jamaican palate. My host points to where the grinding mechanism once stood. “There was always a big slave whose job was to have a sharp machete ready,” she says. “For cutting sugar cane that got caught in the mill?” I ask. “No,” she replies quietly. “It was for anyone whose arm got stuck in the gears. It was faster to cut their arm off than to stop the ox walking in circles turning the gears.” I feel bile rise in my throat. A coldness washes over me. The violence of the past is suddenly visceral and immediate. This practical horror, the economy of amputation over production delays, captures the dehumanization of slavery more powerfully than any exhibit I've ever seen. *** Days later, I met my friend Angela for a tour of Rose Hall, perhaps Jamaica's most famous Great House. The owner of Greenwood had described it as owned by a foreign investment company that had “built a fairy tale” around Annie Palmer, the former enslaver said to have practiced Obeah to kill her husbands before taking enslaved men as lovers. “There,” he had said dismissively, “is the Disneyfication of our history.” Rose Hall allows visitors to tour the house and then relax with cocktails in what was once the dungeon area. The original bars are still visible but now part of the decor of a gift shop and bar. This transformation from site of torture to site of leisure epitomizes the problem: Jamaica is selling its trauma rather than memorializing it. “It doesn't have to be this way,” I tell Angela as we walk the grounds. “In Martinique, there's the Mémorial de l'Anse Caffard which overlooks the Atlantic Ocean.”  I explain that the large, Easter Island-like statues memorialize the area where ships arrived with kidnapped Africans. It’s also the site of an 1830 shipwreck where 300 Africans died while the 6 white crewmembers were the only ones saved. I recall meeting the artist at the memorial when I lived there. I told her I was overcome with emotion, crying openly while a white woman casually watched her dog relieve itself near the cliffs.  I stopped talking as I relived the memory. I gazed toward the supposed grave of Annie Palmer, thinking about what real remembrance looks like, when Angela interrupts my reverie with unexpected irony, “You know l'Anse Caffard literally translates to ‘Cove of Cockroaches.’” Even genuine attempts at memorialization carry their own contradictions. These illogicalities continue as we return to the house, where our Rose Hall guide—a woman about 25—speaks with what we locally call a “twang.” It's an affected accent that approximates American English, developed specifically for the tourism industry. The twang is both a tool and a symptom, allowing Jamaican workers to seem more familiar to American tourists while simultaneously erasing another aspect of authentic Jamaican identity. Even our language must be sacrificed on the altar of foreign comfort. We move through rooms where Annie Palmer allegedly poisoned husbands and tortured slaves, but our guide's focus drifts elsewhere. She points out the imported drapery, the fine China patterns, the exact thread count of period-appropriate bedsheets, and how often the paneled walls must be treated to prevent mold in the tropical climate. Outside the window, I notice workers setting up white folding chairs on the manicured lawn. “For a wedding later today,” the guide explains with a practiced smile. “We host plenty-plenty every year and in October, our haunted tours are quite popular. We have actors dressed as ghosts and Annie Palmer herself.” I hold back a sigh. As a young girl in Jamaican schools, I thought of Annie Palmer as something of a feminist icon—a woman who seized power in a patriarchal world, albeit through murder and manipulation. Now, I see how this “White Witch” nonsense transforms structural oppression into the actions of one particularly evil individual. It allows visitors to condemn her exceptional cruelty while avoiding confrontation with the everyday cruelty that was the foundation of colonial Jamaica. Not a single marker indicates where her murdered husbands might be buried, let alone the countless enslaved people who died working these lands. The guide proudly shares how much work goes into preserving the lawns—the irrigation system, the imported fertilizers, the daily maintenance. I think about the cost of keeping this grass green versus the cost of creating a meaningful memorial. Days later, I had a lengthy conversation with the owner’s wife of Good Hope Estate in the neighboring parish. We talked a lot about mental health before she made a careful distinction. The property belongs to her husband's family, though she lives and works there. Good Hope was purchased and restored to be a place of healing and health, she tells me. People book the Great House and the counting house to hold retreats. Psilocybin therapy and yoga where people can address past trauma were particularly popular and something she highly recommends. Above all, she says, they are a working farm providing jobs and economic mobility to many workers who live in the countryside. I remembered reading that of the approximately 7,000 Great Houses that once dominated Jamaica's landscape, only about 30 remain in decent condition. “Jamaicans need therapy, healing,” she says with conviction. “We carry generational trauma.” I nod, wondering if this could be part of our reparations package from the UK—access to mental health services to process centuries of colonial violence. Then I remember the price tag: thousands of US dollars for psilocybin therapy or even a night at a yoga healing retreat. Beyond the reach of ordinary Jamaicans. Reading my thoughts, she adds that she researched whether her family-owned slaves and concluded that the best she could do was become a “job provider.” This seems to be the moral solution. This economic framing transforms historical accountability into a transactional relationship that preserves her position of privilege while claiming to address centuries of wrongs. It echoes what I read about a prominent artist from the same milieu. It’s a benevolent identity that requires no genuine redistribution of power or wealth. You can almost set your watch to the eventuality that someone will mention a Black ancestor typically deployed to dilute responsibility for inherited privilege. This selective genealogical emphasis is common among Caribbean elites. They claim kinship with the oppressed while maintaining the economic structures their slaveholding ancestors established. Privilege constantly reinvents itself. I say nothing to dispute her rationale. She is a nice woman and I need her connections and patronage if I’m to get freelancing work on the island. *** Driving back along Gloucester Avenue, what I grew up knowing as the “Hip Strip” later renamed to honor reggae superstar Jimmy Cliff, I consider how Jamaica struggles to reconcile its past with its present. Tourism is our economic lifeblood, yet it often requires that we perform versions of ourselves we think tourists find pleasant, versions that don't demand uncomfortable reckonings with history. I think of Germany's concentration camps, preserved as sites of somber reflection and education. I think of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which confronts America's history of racial terror lynchings. These places say: here, something terrible happened. Here, we must remember. Where is Jamaica's place of remembrance? Where can we, as a nation, confront the psychic wounds that continue to shape our society? Social ills that range from our persistent colorism to our economic dependence on foreign visitors? How can we move forward without acknowledging where we've been? I navigate through Montego Bay traffic. I pass resorts, private schools, and gated communities built atop former British garrisons. I wonder what it would mean to create a space that honors not just the resistance of figures like Sam Sharpe but also the daily resistance of those who survived—those who maintained their humanity in a system designed to strip it away, those who preserved African traditions in secret, those who passed down stories and songs that would eventually become the foundation of Jamaican culture. Perhaps what we need is not just a museum but a national conversation about how slavery's legacy continues to shape our island. Not to assign blame but to understand ourselves more fully. Until then, we remain haunted, moving through spaces marked by unacknowledged ghosts, telling incomplete stories, and wondering why the past still feels so painfully present. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and more. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet. Her debut pamphlet I Am Evidence, is published by Bloodaxe Books. She’s won the Eric Gregory Award, Michael Marks Award, Bridport Prize Young Writers Award and Mslexia Women’s Pamphlet Prize. Shortlisted for The White Review Poet's Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award’s Poetry Prize, the Bridport Poetry Prize, the Derby Poetry Festival Poetry Prize and the Poetry Wales Pamphlet competition. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Poetry Review, Magma Poetry, Propel Magazine, Poetry Wales, The White Review, Stand Magazine, The Indianapolis Review, Bath Magg, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Anthropocene Poetry Journal, Lumiere Review and The Adriatic Magazine . Her work has been anthologised by Anamot Press, Bridport Prize, Re.creation, Peekash Press, Bad Betty Press and Flipped Eye Press. She is currently a Cave Canem fellow and an alumna of The London Library Emerging Writers Programme, Malika's Poetry Kitchen, Barbican Young Poets, Obsidian Foundation Fellow, Griots Well Collective, Poet in the City Producers Programme, Out-Spoken Press Emerging Poets Development Scheme and Roundhouse Poetry Collective. She has performed at Glastonbury Festival, The U.S. Embassy, Brainchild Festival and UKYA City Takeover. She has been commissioned by the Museum of London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Fuel Theatre, Apples and Snakes, Victoria & Albert Museum, Guildhall, Tate Britain, The African Centre, BBC 1Xtra, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Birth Rites Collection, Tommy’s, The Sidings, John's Hopkins University, The University of Warwick, Weclome Trust and Spread the Word. Job 1:1-2:10 It’s unfortunate how pain reaches the innocent, the way cupped hands find bald heads to slap. I imagine Job bald and Satan’s hand in formation. Job’s children and livestock, all dead; friends, health, properties, all gone. Armoured loyalty proclaims the Lord gives and takes away; still, his name is to be praised . Mama too, hopes in the Lord. Plants her last into the offering basket, faithfully waiting to reap a harvest of blessings. I would pray for Judas’ resurrection to pickpocket on our behalf, but my faith is decrepit. Mama says nuh worry, God always shows up on time . While we wait for recompense, our landlord’s calculator and outstretched palm arrive first. Mama’s hand runs through her hair. Stress gives her enough strands for a wig. Satan stands behind her at the ready. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and more. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Jā. R. Macki is the author of Linus Baby (Pie Face Child Press, 2023). Her writing and visual art have appeared in midnight & indigo , The Spectacle , Skink Beat Review , RipRap46 , and forthcoming from Brown Sugar Lit . She is from Chicago and holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He and I after Natalia Ginzburg for Jasminum When the samaras parachute from the branches, I take spring walks to the good parks with my father. He picks up the winged ends from the ground and turns them into helicopters with his bare hands to amuse then shows me how. In summer, when Chicago is at its best, he takes me to 7-Eleven for suicide Slurpees. He takes me to Toys R Us on his paydays for whatever I want. I want white Barbie dolls. I want the Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. I want the moist rubber squish of neon green Gak. In winter months, he can grease a small child’s face with Vaseline better than most mamas. He does not speak any language other than English. And I speak and understand a decent amount of French. He navigates Chicago streets well; I do not navigate the city’s streets well without GPS. He travels to new cities. I travel to new cities. I do not know if he moves about those cities like a thoughtless butterfly because I do not travel with him to cities. I learned he has traveled to cities in other people’s armchair conversations about him. He likes crossword puzzles, Montblanc pens, and music, especially music. I like music, crossword puzzles don’t mean much to me, and I like the glide of a Zebra F-301 on canary yellow legal paper. He likes James Brown. I like Michael Jackson. Surprise! I learned that, besides having a passion for basketball, he also likes bowling and is good at it. I do not bowl often, but I’ve known strikes. I love and understand one thing in the world, and that is feelings. He likes the Mister Shop, and I will go with him willingly with curiosity and admiration to the North Riverside Mall through the second-floor entrance right next to the Sears and down the escalator to watch him try on Mauri’s. He has a distinguished sense of style. He adorns himself with jewelry and keeps his nails clean. His attire is that of a man you’d want to sweep you off your feet, while my style is inspired by his through the lens of a woman we both love. He buys underwear and socks at Burlington. And I follow him to the gun and jewelry stores, a pawn shop. He is well-dressed, even in casual clothes. Right hand to God. And I am dressed well enough most days, but will wear a faded, oil-stained Misfits t-shirt to run errands. He is not shy. He is quiet. His quietness does not make him standoffish. He’s laid back. Kool as his cigarettes. And I am quiet until my observations are complete. He likes precision and order. He washes his car and cleans the vents and crevices with Q-tips. He is meticulous. And I find order in the chaos I create. He loves from a distance.                                                                He teaches me how.  And I am loved  becomes a problem I want to solve. He orders a combination beef from Portillo’s, dipped with sweet and hot peppers, fries, and a strawberry shake. I order a jumbo chili cheese dog or a grilled chicken sandwich on croissant with extra mayo and American cheese, fries, and chocolate malt. I fill the paper cups with ketchup for him. Then we squeeze across the red vinyl booth seats. He orders Hi-C orange no matter what his McDonald’s order is. And I order Hi-C orange and remember him. He does not have brothers, but he ensured I had a secret one. He is tall, and I am short. He is funny, and I am told I’m funny too, though I am often in disbelief. He is charming, chivalrous, and women give him attention. I am charming and chivalrous, and women give me attention. He has a name spelled with two capital “M’s.” I have a name spelled with two capital “M’s.” He has a small two-bedroom house in his name, 35 miles away, I never lived in. I had a home in my mother’s name I lived in all the time. He doesn’t like to talk on the phone when he’s home, but I can call him at work. He writes me letters like he lives out of state. And I write him back. He tells me my penmanship has improved. In exchange for being born, I get to be the reason why he’s not home when he’s not home, even though he’s not with me.  He inspects luxury items for their authenticity. He turns his palms into scales that weigh gold. He stretches his toes down the scaled throats of crocodiles, gators, and snakes. He rubs the tanned skins, discerning the suppleness beneath his fingertips before inhaling the mild, slightly sweet, earthy smell of a natural good. Like a spirit conjured at a séance, He tells me he got married through my mother’s voice across the kitchen table, and I find it curious his sudden preoccupation with knockoffs. He is missed before death because he died when I was eight, and I buried him when I was thirty-three. He is missed before death, and I am the one who does the missing, always. He makes promises a tight knot, then loosens them like party balloons ascending into the deep blue sky of my soul. He picks a bouquet of forget-me-nots, and every petal is stuck on he loves me. He knows how to change a tire roadside. And I am stranded roadside for things he did not teach me. He played baseball in his youth and was good. I played basketball in my youth and wasn’t. When I take interest in his sports acumen, he tells me I know nothing.  He has an incredible number of tools because he doesn’t believe in paying someone else to do what he can do for himself. He sews a patch of himself into a new family. And my needs turn into ghosts that don’t haunt him. He leaves his blood unfinished. And I have drafts on him that are unfinished, too.  At the show, he likes to sit wherever I want to. We do not go with others, and he often falls asleep and snores to the Addams Family Values , Candyman , and Tank Girl , but not Friday After Next .          He tells me I know nothing (about him), but this is not true. I am curious about a few, a very few things, namely, the amount of writing about him it will take to patch a hole. He is handsome, especially when he smiles with teeth, which he rarely does. He is the type of handsome that will make a funeral director seek an immediate manicure in anticipation of seeing him again. Everything I do is done laboriously, with great difficulty and uncertainty, like my relationship with him. If I want to finish anything important, I procrastinate because I cling to a mountain of inadequacy I scale every time I advance a step on my intended path. The goodness is a menacing giant reaching down the beanstalk. “Congratulations” is a phantom. He doesn’t understand his impact, and He and I are on season 33.          He tells me had he died first, I  wouldn’t be so sad. And I  feel guilty when I think he’s right. He is handy. And I am not. He finds time for minor repairs on my mother’s home. He patches some piece of our relationship that lifts and falls from an unfinished wall down to the concrete basement floor. He is reactive when I tell the woman he shares his life with about the importance of my phone calls. The authority in his voice is ineffective, a foreign language I don’t understand. And I regret calling him. He doesn’t know how to type, though I taught him to text. But I do not receive his texts often. I don’t know how to use a gun, and he does. If I suggest that he take me to the gun range, he scoffs at the idea and says I’m too sensitive, though I’ve witnessed him at Thanksgiving saying that every woman should have a gun; I am not a woman to him. He is a doorman. When I want to elevate who he is at work, I say he’s a concierge. I see him as a successful man. When I fail at things, I remember he’s not. He tells me he loves me. And I am suspicious of I love you . He is prideful and will decline lunch invitations if I’m paying. Some of his pride sticks to me and creates a barrier between me and those left to love me. He doesn’t cry. He maintains that if a man has to cry, he better not do it in front of his woman. He insists the man must go somewhere else. Take a walk to cry. And I cry whenever my heart is moved. I cry openly and without shame. I cry loudly on benches in front of beautiful fountains. I cry until I cannot breathe through my nose. I cry until my voice sounds like it’s stuck in a bag of water. My sensitivity is a consciousness he sees as a blind spot. When I cry around him, he tries to stop it immediately. I used to think he couldn’t stand to witness my tears, but now I wonder who taught him to banish/outlaw/suppress them if every cigarette smoked was an unshed tear.  He doesn’t cry, but he took the opportunity at my mother’s funeral. And I sat there beside him, stunned by the state of branches. In the splintered memory of my childhood, it is morning, and he is still in his towel, curly black hairs scattered across his chest, brushing his teeth at the bathroom sink behind a thin curtain of shower steam vanishing through the doorway, scenting the hall of our large one-bedroom apartment with the masculine and high end scent of Photo by Karl Lagerfeld. He likes Barq’s root beer with sausage and cheese pizza from Home Run Inn on 31st Street. He likes a fresh Chicago mix and good cigars. He adorns his ears with diamond studs clear as water. The greatest thing he ever achieved was this hole to the left of my sternum where I keep his eight-year-old daughter. He does not help her get over how she hesitates before doing anything, or her love for him. And so, more than ever, I feel. But behind my smile, I am quieting a rage. at post burial GoFundMes and an unmarked grave  3287 days and counting. Every time I walk this cemetery on the occasion of death I hope to see the mark of your final resting place but there is none and I wonder if you ever Existed He can be silly and fun to be around. He has a hearty laugh that gets stuck in his throat and sounds like air released from a balloon for half a sec before it fills the room. When he’s around, I forget my feelings before and ask him no questions about time, though I burn for ancient answers. He has a heart tattoo on his arm with his daughter’s name inked across its ribbon. He keeps her kindergarten graduation picture in his locker at work for more than 25 years. He is proud of someone he made. I think. He takes her to Lincoln Park Zoo and the Museum of Science and Industry, but she likes the museum the best. She asks him to take her to the coal miner’s exhibit because she likes the rush and rumble of the metal elevator ride in the dark. She learns the important role of canaries in mines and how they warned of toxic gas. [...] ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and more. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Deesha Philyaw is the award-winning author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies . Deesha Philyaw ’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies , won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction. Deesha’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman , is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026. Snap “Birds taught a lot of men how to become caring men.” – William “Speedy” Boykins “You can have success.” – Paul Gomez Despite his absence and his negligence, or perhaps because of them, my earliest memory is of my father. We are at the house where I live with my mother and my grandmother. This is the only time I remember him being inside our house in the eighteen years I lived there. In this memory, I’m a toddler, not yet potty trained. I know this because my mother has called my father to come and force me to sit on the potty.  My father arrives, and he is angry and threatens to spank me. I don’t want him to spank me or to be angry with me. I want him to love me. Somehow, I already understand that his love is tenuous. So I sit on the potty. When he begins to leave, I notice that wrestling (the fake kind) is on TV. I recall seeing my father, grandfather, and uncles watching wrestling during the occasional weekends I spend at my grandparents’ house, the house where my father lives with his parents and siblings — or rather, the place where he gets his mail and changes his clothes once or twice a week. Because I know my father likes wrestling, I try to point out that wrestling is on the TV: to get in his good graces, to put the whole potty thing behind us. But either I don’t have the words to tell him, or he’s ignoring me. I am not yet toilet-trained, but already I’m trying to figure out how to make my father stay. In 1971, when 22-year-old Cornell Norwood was forming the Black Country Roller Club for Black male pigeon fanciers , I was born to my 18-year-old mother and 20-year-old father, Donald, who everybody called Snap though I never knew why. Did they call him “Snap” because he was a short, scrawny man, “not bigger than a minute,” as some old folks would say while snapping their fingers? Or was it because you could snap your fingers and he was gone that quickly from wherever he had been just before — a woman’s life, or a child’s? I said a long time ago that I was done writing about my father. That I had said all that I wanted or needed to say about him. But lately, he’s been showing up in my essays, showing up in places he has no business being. He did that twenty years ago when I was almost-30, trying to track me down when I was back in my hometown for a visit. I thought of all the lies, of all the times I’d waited on the front porch for him to show up, pick me up, give me lunch money, and he didn’t, after saying he would.  You want to follow me around when I’m 30, but you couldn’t show up for me when I was 3? Or 13? I told him to back off. There’s so much I don’t know about my father, and the little I do know has caused me more grief than happiness.  What I do know: Snap was a ladies’ man. But my (half) sister T and I could never understand the appeal of him. Once we were old and cynical enough to joke about his neglect, we’d wonder what our mothers had been smoking to make them think Snap was a catch; after all, crack hadn’t yet seized our community in the early 70s when we were born. My stepmother (Snap married in middle age) once offered a clue, oversharing with me in a horrible moment of grief-filled TMI, which, however uncomfortable, was fitting: I always felt my father belonged to women, to the streets, to the bar, to everything and everyone except me. In his carnal world, there was no place for a child. How did my father define success? I never knew his aspirations, or if he had any. I never heard him complain about racism or White folks. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t; I never heard him say much of anything about the world beyond women, Champale, and his beloved Saturday morning wrestling. But perhaps he saw potential for success in me. He must’ve bragged on my good grades to the White bosses at the luggage manufacturing company where he worked for more than twenty years because on the occasions he took me to his job, these jowly, red-faced White men would say things to me like, “You’re the smart one. Spell a big word for me!” Dance, lil monkey, dance. Years later, I learned that my father’s Black and Brown co-workers, the line workers who made the luggage, had considered him an Uncle Tom. He held a supervisory role, a layer of management between them and the White bosses. Neither the line workers nor the bosses respected my father, although the bosses did bail him out for a time. They gave him advances on his paychecks, believing his lie that he was a single father raising four daughters whose mothers were all drug addicts. They also believed the lie that he was paying for me to go to Yale, a lie bolstered by a bumper sticker he bought for his minivan when he, my uncle, and my mother drove to New Haven to move me into my dorm: My Daughter and My Dollars Go to Yale , it read. In the course of my four undergraduate years, my father gave me fifty dollars, once. I think of my father’s multiple car repossessions (including the minivan and a car he “bought” for me) and how he never lived under a roof that didn’t belong to my grandparents or a woman, and I wonder what kind of father he could have been if he’d been successful at something. Or if he could’ve practiced caring on some birds. Or had space to be creative and feel in control, part of a community. Maybe then he would’ve taken me to the zoo, which is where my mother believed he took me when he did keep his word and pick me up on the weekends. She casually mentioned this zoo thing when I was in my 20s, and I laughed an unkind laugh and told her she had to be kidding, that there was nothing about my father that said, Take my kid to the zoo. His unkempt appearance and unreliability aligned more with the bars and women’s homes he took me to. My mother’s delusions about my father had roots in the wounds left by her own father’s absence. She never asked me where Snap took me; she needed to believe in a version of him that didn’t hurt me. Chuck Hatcher, Cornell Norwood’s pigeon protégée, credits the birds with being “solace, meditative, almost a spiritual aspect to inner peace, because the Black man has so much to deal with…” Did my father ever know peace? Was he troubled by his life as a Black man in this country, or by his failures as a father? I used to wonder, as a kid, if he ever missed me, if he ever felt sad or guilty about disappointing me more than he kept his word. I wondered if he felt bad about missing so much of my life and my (half) sisters’ lives. I wondered if his many lies weighed on his conscience. I wondered why his mother’s God didn’t “convict his heart,” a phrase I’d heard in church. I wondered if my father thought of me on my birthday or at Christmas, even though he didn’t give me gifts, even though I still gave him gifts at my mother’s insistence. I wondered if he ever considered apologizing. Brought together by my mother’s terminal cancer, my father and I had six good Sundays before he died unexpectedly of a massive stroke at age 54, a few months after my mom passed away. On those six Sundays, so much was left unsaid. My father left me with far more questions than answers. More than fifteen years after his death, the questions remain but the focus has changed. I wonder less now about how my father thought of himself as my father, and more about how he thought of himself as a man who lived, it seemed, without tenderness. If he thought of himself that way at all. I don’t have to wonder if he could miss what he never had. I already know that much to be true. ©2021 Pipe Wrench Magazine. First published in Pipe Wrench. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Deesha Philyaw and Jae Nichelle on May 5th, 2025. “Snap” is such a moving and intimate piece. As an accomplished essayist and storyteller, do you feel any difference in your relationship with how your nonfiction lives in the world versus your fiction work? I feel freer, bolder in my fiction. And once my stories are in the world, they no longer belong just to me. Readers engage with my fiction in all sorts of ways, and I’m continually surprised and appreciative to hear how they connect with the stories. By contrast, my willingness to be open and revelatory in my personal essays has unfolded very gradually over many years. I’m concerned with self-protection as well as protecting others I care about. Once those essays are out in the world, I feel a bit exposed and less comfortable engaging directly with readers about them. It’s easier to talk with strangers about my short stories, their themes and origins, and my process than about aspects of my personal life and history. But I don’t really stress too much about it because my essays have a lower profile in the world than my fiction.   In the essay, you write that you’d told yourself you were done writing about your father. Is there anything currently that you feel “done” writing about? I think I really am done now writing about my father in my nonfiction. I can’t think of anything else I’m ready to swear off writing about. That said, aspects of my father and of our relationship will probably continue to show up in my fiction.  It’s interesting that this idea of “success” comes up in “Snap,” as you spoke of success in an interview with Literary Mama  where you said, “I am succeeding when my heart is in good shape.” What’s keeping your heart in good shape these days? Traveling with my partner, going to therapy, spending time with my daughters and with my friends, and reading some really stellar poetry collections, including Boy, Maybe  by W.J. Lofton and The Book of Alice  by Diamond Forde (forthcoming). What’s your favorite way to spend a day off? Sleeping in, eating brunch foods I don’t have to cook, curling up on the couch with books to read purely for pleasure.  The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, your debut novel, is coming out in 2026! Can you share a bit about how this story initially took shape?  This book has been a long time coming and has had several incarnations. I started writing it in 2007 with a main character who was then named Rebecca, a former megachurch pastor’s wife, aka first lady. In that earliest draft, she was recently divorced and struggling to co-parent with the pastor (who was 15 years her senior), while starting to date again. That was kind of my life at the time; my ex wasn’t a pastor, but I was newly divorced and dating. An early reader gave me some advice that ultimately changed the whole trajectory of the novel, for the better. I’d written a chapter or two, which she’d read, and she said they were cool but she really wanted to see the inside of Rebecca’s marriage to the pastor, before it ended. So I re-oriented the novel such that it opened with Rebecca unhappily married. And I realized when I returned to that draft that I’d skipped ahead to Rebecca’s divorce probably because I didn’t want to revisit my own unhappy marriage. And thus began the process of separating myself from the character, allowing her to be herself, and not me, allowing her choices and tastes and values to differ from mine. The biggest change was that the character went from secretly hating her role as first lady (as I would) to fully relishing it at the outset of the novel. That change opened up a whole world of fun possibilities, enabling me to give Scharisse (fka Rebecca) more depth and to give her story as a whole higher stakes, as her marriage and her life as a whole begin to unravel. You co-host two incredible podcasts. What’s a moment with a recent podcast guest that has stuck with you? Destiny O. Birdsong was our guest on Ursa Short Fiction, and we were discussing a short story of hers that included content related to sex work and queer sex. The story was published online and then taken down by the publisher less than 24 hours later for dubious reasons that basically boiled down to poorly disguised censorship. When it happened, Destiny says, “I had this overwhelming feeling that felt very familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, and it wasn’t until a few days later that I realized that that feeling was slut shaming. And there’s something about being slut shamed, like it lives in my bones. It’s like muscle memory.” And that made me think about how powerful shame is, and how deeply rooted it can live in us if we were raised to be ashamed of our bodies, our desires, or even our insistence on liberation and rejection of binaries. Rooting out that shame––calling it by its name as Destiny did––requires vigilance, sometimes daily. On the subject of podcasts, what’s a non-literary topic that you could talk about for hours if someone let you? It’s a tie between 1) how the horrible manosphere/misogynistic podcast industrial complex makes dating damn-near impossible, and 2) the new Black soap opera, Beyond the Gates . I am obsessed with that show! How can people support you right now?  By pre-ordering or buying (depending on the timing) That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor  edited by the Pittsburgh homie Damon Young. I have a story in it, “Group Chat,” that’s hilarious, if I do say so myself. Name another Black woman writer people should know.  I can’t name just one! There’s Annell López, author of the remarkable debut short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason . Jamila Minnicks’ fantastic debut novel of historical fiction, Moonrise Over New Jessup , is essential reading. The inimitable Mahogany L. Browne’s latest is a beautiful and timely YA novel, A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe . My West Virginia University Press-mate, Megan Howell, has written a jaw-dropper of a story collection, Softie . And I’m looking forward to Cleyvis Natera’s stunning sophomore novel The Grand Paloma Resort . ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Princess Usanga is a Miami-based director and writer with Haitian and Nigerian roots, born in Queens, New York. Her storytelling delves into the nuances of the human experience through the lens of self-discovery, compassion, and situational irony. As an African and Caribbean Black woman, Usanga is intentional about sharing perspectives from intersectional identities. Usanga studied Television and Film Production at St. John’s University and went on to direct her first short film, God’s Atheist . She was later commissioned by Oolite Arts to create her coming-of-age ’90s short film, Hooky , which she wrote and directed. Hooky premiered at Africa Film Society’s Classics in the Park Film Festival in Accra, Ghana. Hooky will air on PBS as part of their Film-maker series (Season 7), which highlights short films from South Florida filmmakers. The film was nominated for Best Short Film at the Key West Film Festival and screened at the Norton Museum of Art. Additionally, Hooky received recognition from ARRI Camera by being featured on their website and social media pages. Usanga recently penned the action film The Poacher Assassin and is c urrently in pre-production for Missed Connections , a surrealistic dramedy and proof-of-concept short for her feature film debut. Hooky EXT. SIDE FENCE OF APARTMENT COMPLEX - DAY - 1995 A BOOK BAG flings over a FENCE. NORA, 15, Haitian-American, straight-laced freshman, climbs the FENCE and reaches the top with her legs on both sides. NORA I don't know about this, Renee. She looks down to RENEE, 17, Cuban-American, a rebellious, baggy jean sophomore, who is catching her breath. RENEE Just jump! Someone might see you. Reluctant, Nora jumps. NORA Pass me your book bag. RENEE I’m gonna keep mine on. I ain’t got shit in there anyway. Renee climbs up after. EXT. FRONT DOOR - NORA'S APARTMENT - DAY Renee quickly BANGS on an apartment DOOR on the second floor and follows Nora DOWNSTAIRS, leaping over the last steps onto the ground floor. Nora and Renee run down the hallway and hide. EXT. FRONT DOOR - NORA'S APARTMENT - DAY NORA'S MOM, 30's, wearing work clothes, makeup, and CURLERS in her hair, opens the door and peeks out. NORA'S MOM Hello? EXT. FIRST FLOOR HALLWAY - NORA'S BUILDING - DAY Nora and Renee are hiding behind the staircase wall. RENEE Fuck. She's still home. Nora shushes Renee. EXT. FRONT DOOR - NORA'S APARTMENT - DAY NORA'S MOM Nora?... Is that you?...   EXT. FIRST FLOOR HALLWAY - NORA'S BUILDING - DAY Nora and Renee remain silent. Moments later, a door shuts. They wait for a moment, then head down the hall. EXT. NEIGHBORING APARTMENT BUILDING - LATER - DAY Renee scopes Nora's apartment door from the building across. Nora paces next to her. NORA She said my name! RENEE She doesn't know it's you. NORA Maybe I should just walk to school. I can make it there by 3rd period. I don’t want to be grounded... No phone for a month. I can’t do it! RENEE You're freaking out and shit. Chill! NORA My grandparents are gonna tell my mom to put me on punishment longer. They've been in charge ever since my parents got divorced. RENEE I wish my parents got divorced. NORA Why? RENEE (abruptly) Yo. When the fuck is your mom going to work?! (looks at her watch) It's almost ten. NORA I don't know. Let's go chill somewhere else until she leaves. EXT. PARKING LOT AREA IN NORA’S APARTMENT COMPLEX - DAY Nora is sitting in the GRASS with Renee and fumbling with her WALKMAN. NORA Damn. My batteries died... My mixtape is the bomb too! RENEE For real?! What's on it? NORA Bro, I got like everything! SWV, Jodeci, Aaliyah, Tevin Campbell, Beenie Man, Nirvana... (beat) Side B is the Booty Dancing Mix.   RENEE Haha. "B" for booty. NORA I got Uncle Al, Luke, that Tootsie Roll song, The Puppies... RENEE Yoooo! Hook me up with a copy. NORA I got you! Neighbors passing by give glaring looks at Nora and Renee. Nora taps Renee and points at the neighbors.   RENEE Aight. Let's dip. EXT. PLAYGROUND IN NORA'S APARTMENT COMPLEX - DAY Nora and Renee are sliding down the playground SLIDES. They end up sitting on the swings. NORA You got lipstick and lip liner? RENEE I got you. Renee looks in her book bag and passes the lip liner and lipstick. Nora puts on DARK BROWN LIP LINER, then applies BROWN LIPSTICK. Renee lights up a CIGARETTE and takes a puff. She gestures towards Nora. NORA Nah, I don't smoke. RENEE What about weed? NORA I don't do drugs. RENEE Drugs? (laughs out smoke) It's just weed. You probably won the D.A.R.E medal and shit. NORA I did. They both bust out laughing. Beep. Beep. Beep.  Renee pulls her BEEPER off her hip. RENEE This nigga is always sweatin' me.   NORA I wish I had a beeper. RENEE Get a beeper then! NORA My mom won't let me. She says they're for drug dealers. RENEE What?! NORA My mom's Haitian. They be trippin'. RENEE My mom doesn't care. NORA You're lucky. RENEE Not really... Renee's beeper goes off again and she checks it. NORA I dedicated "Can't You See" to Marco on 99 Jamz. RENEE Gutierrez? NORA Yeah, that nigga is so fine... I gave him a note telling him to listen to the radio that night. RENEE Oh, shit! What happened!? NORA Vanessa asked him the next day if he heard it and he was like, "No." RENEE Forget him. He's being whack as fuck. Renee's beeper goes off again. RENEE  Bro. He needs to chill. NORA I think he's going to the dance. RENEE Never make someone a priority when you're an option. Why you think niggas always be sweating me? NORA Never mind - you don't get it. Renee puts her hands on her knees with her cigarette in her hand and twerks. RENEE Booty dance at the dance like a bad bitch and ignore him. Niggas LOVE to chase. Nora forces a chuckle and swings in silence. RENEE  Damn, you're all depressed and shit. You need some fun. Where's the pool? Renee flicks her cigarette onto the sandy ground and steps on it. EXT. POOL AREA/OTHER PLACES IN NORA'S APT COMPLEX DAY MONTAGE - NORA AND RENEE HIDE IN DIFFERENT PLACES IN THE APARTMENT COMPLEX -- Talking at the edge of the pool while Renee smokes. -- Renee and Nora do the TOOTSIE ROLL dance. -- Renee teaching Nora how to twerk, until SECURITY pulls up in a GOLF CART. Nora and Renee run. -- Nora fans herself with a notebook and Renee flaps the bottom of her shirt. They are sweating. END MONTAGE   INT. LIVING ROOM - NORA’S APARTMENT - DAY Renee is sitting on the floor in front of the TELEVISION while eating tater tots.                     RING. RING. RING.  Renee and Nora look at the phone. RENEE Answer it! It’s probably Killian. NORA Why would Killian call? RENEE They send out an automated call thing to tell your mom you missed school. She has to press a number to show that she got the call. NORA Fine. RENEE Hurry up! They only call once. Then they send a letter! Nora finally picks up the phone that is incessantly ringing. NORA (on phone) Hello. GRANDMA (V.O.) Nora! Oh, oh. Why are you not at school? NORA (talking in an old Spanish lady voice) Alo? Alo? GRANDMA (V.O.) Go to school! Nora. Why are you home? NORA Quien habla? Que? GRANDMA (V.O.) Haaaaaay. I fix you. Se sa! NORA (whispers to Renee) It's my grandma! RENEE Why is she calling during school? NORA I don’t know! RENEE Give me the phone. Renee approaches Nora and takes the phone. RENEE (cont'd) No se. ¿Que me estas diciendo? Tienes el numero equivocado. GRANDMA (V.O.) Nora. Nora. Huh! I’m coming for you. M'ap vini. Ou frekan wi! M'ap vini. Tann mwen. M'ap vini. RENEE (on phone) Que? Renee slams the phone. NORA What did she say? RENEE She kept speaking Haitian- NORA (corrective) Kreyòl. RENEE My bad! KREYÒL. She kept talking about a mop. NORA M'ap vini? RENEE Yeah, that’s it! NORA Shit. That means, “I’m coming.” We have to leave right NOW! Nora gets her book bag and frantically starts cleaning up the place. RENEE We just got here. Doesn’t she live like in B.F.E? NORA She’s gonna ask my Grandpa to drive her here. RENEE Bro, I’m so hungry. Just don’t answer the door. NORA She has the key! Renee grabs some TATER TOTS and puts them in a PAPER TOWEL. EXT. FRONT DOOR - NORA'S APARTMENT - DAY Nora and Renee walk outside the front door. Nora sees an older Black couple (50's-60's) approaching. The woman is carrying a PURSE and a STRIPED MARKET BAG. INT. LIVING ROOM - NORA’S APARTMENT - DAY Nora sees them and immediately opens the door, grabs Renee's wrist, pulls her back in the apartment, and closes the door. RENEE Yo. What the fuck?! NORA It's them. RENEE Oh, shit. The LOCKS can be seen and heard turning. The door opens, and NORA’S GRANDMA and GRANDPA walk inside. GRANDMA Nora, where are you? Nora! Nora! Nora and Renee can be seen hiding on the balcony. The slightly open BLINDS barely disguise their presence. Grandma walks up to the TV, touches it, feels its warmth, and pauses. She then bends down and picks up a tater tot from the floor. EXT. BALCONY - NORA'S APARTMENT - DAY Nora and Renee are crouched in the corner of the balcony while whispering. Renee is eating tater tots. NORA As soon as they leave the living room we jump.   RENEE Jump? NORA Off the balcony. RENEE Are you fucking crazy?! NORA I'm not getting caught. If my grandma finds us, I'm scarred until I'm 18. RENEE Chill. Let's just wait here. INT. LIVING ROOM - NORA’S APARTMENT - DAY Grandpa's back is turned towards the balcony. He turns his head slightly after hearing the NOISE  from Nora standing against the railing. Nora quickly ducks. GRANDPA (yells out) Honey, what are you doing back there? INT. NORA’S BEDROOM - NORA'S APARTMENT - DAY Grandma is on all fours, looking under Nora's BED.   GRANDMA (yelling) I'm checking under the bed. EXT. BALCONY - NORA'S APARTMENT - DAY The girls are hiding. Renee's beeper goes off, and she immediately presses a button on her beeper to turn it off.  RENEE Shit! INT. LIVING ROOM - NORA’S APARTMENT - DAY Grandpa turns his head towards the balcony then takes a step towards the balcony. He hears Grandma yelling from Nora's room (the grandparents are speaking to each other in Kreyol the entire time). GRANDMA (V.O.) (yelling from bedroom) Robert!! Come, come, hurry! GRANDPA (yelling out) What happened?! GRANDMA (V.O.) (yelling) I can't get up! My back. Grandpa sucks his teeth and leaves the living room to go attend to Grandma. EXT. BALCONY - NORA'S APARTMENT - DAY Renee is squatting and peering through the balcony sliding door and sees Nora's Grandpa leave. Renee signals to move. INT. NORA’S BEDROOM - NORA'S APARTMENT - DAY Grandpa is helping his wife get off the floor. Grandma stands up and brushes herself off.   GRANDMA Did you hear something? GRANDPA No. GRANDMA Check the balcony. Grandpa annoyingly walks out the room. EXT. SOMEWHERE IN NORA’S APARTMENT COMPLEX - AFTERNOON Nora and Renee are running, and eventually they stop. NORA This is stupid. I didn’t even want to skip school... I could’ve saw Marco. RENEE That nigga doesn’t even notice you. NORA He said “wuzzup” to me yesterday when I passed by him. Maybe he would’ve talked to me today. RENEE Whateva. NORA I was trying to help you, since you didn’t study for your stupid test and your grandma lives at your house. RENEE Mi abuela esta en Cuba. NORA Huh? RENEE My grandma lives in Cuba, and I didn't study for my stupid test, because - there was no test! NORA What?!   RENEE I knew you wouldn’t do it. You’re always like, "No, I can’t. No, no, no, no, no." That’s why your name is Nora. You make a big fucking deal about everything. It’s not even that serious. NORA Not that serious?! My mom's gonna be pissed! RENEE At least your parents give a fuck! NORA I’m not gonna be able to go to the dance anymore. We spent the whole fucking day hiding. This was the stupidest shit ever. RENEE You’re just like my mom. Chasing some guy who doesn't give a shit about you and probably cheats on you. Watch you end up just like her - crying and yelling every fucking day. Nora is silent while absorbing what Renee just revealed. RENEE (cont'd) Fuck Marco and that stupid dance. (beat) You're a bitch! Nora is speechless, then quickly gathers herself. NORA Look who's talking! Nora walks off in the opposite direction with her middle finger in the air. Renee walks off in the other direction holding back tears. Nora stops walking and reluctantly turns her head only to see that Renee is gone. INT. LIVING ROOM - NORA’S APARTMENT - AFTERNOON (4:30PM ISH) Nora opens the front door and finds her brother, SEBASTIAN, 6 years old, in the family room. RING. RING. RING. Nora walks up to the PHONE. NORA (on phone) Hello. Nora listens to the phone, then presses a number on the phone and hangs up. SEBASTIAN Grandma called.   NORA Shut up. SEBASTIAN She said you skipped school. NORA I didn’t skip school, stupid. I just got back from school. SEBASTIAN Grandma said you hung up on her, so she came over. She left dinner in the fridge that mom was supposed to pick up. NORA How can I talk to her if I was at school? SEBASTIAN Grandma said the TV was warm and she found a tater tot in front of the TV. RING RING RING. Nora and her brother look at each other. SEBASTIAN (cont'd) (tauntingly) It’s probably grandma. NORA Answer it. Tell her I’m in the bathroom. Sebastian picks up the phone.   SEBASTIAN (on phone) Hello... Yes, grandma. She’s right here. Sebastian hands Nora the phone with a victorious smile. Nora angrily snatches the phone from his hand. NORA (on phone) Hello. RENEE (on phone) Hey. NORA (on phone) Hold on. SEBASTIAN Grandma says you're becoming a vakabon.   INT. HALLWAY - NORA'S APARTMENT - EARLY EVENING Nora takes the phone into her room while dragging a RIDICULOUSLY LONG PHONE CORD throughout the apartment then talks on the phone with Renee. INT. NORA’S BEDROOM - NORA'S APARTMENT - EARLY EVENING NORA sits on her BED. There are POSTERS on her wall of TUPAC, AALIYAH, TLC, and JONATHAN BRANDIS. NORA (on phone) Hey. INT. RENEE'S BEDROOM - RENEE'S HOUSE - EARLY EVENING Renee's parents can be heard arguing in the background. She tries to muffle out the sound with her hand while she talks.   RENEE (on phone) You straight? INT. NORA’S BEDROOM - NORA'S APARTMENT - EARLY EVENING NORA (on phone) The school called and I picked up. RENEE (on phone) Good... What happened with your Grandma? NORA (on phone) She told my brother she saw food and that the TV was warm. RENEE (on phone) That's some X-Files shit. Nora sighs with a deep breath... The argument in the background escalates with the sound of GLASS BREAKING. NORA (on phone) You should come over - like now. We're gonna eat dinner. RENEE (on phone) Aight. Cool. Imma dip. INT. NORA’S KITCHEN - NORA'S APARTMENT - EVENING Nora opens the refrigerator and pulls out the Tupperware filled with HAITIAN FOOD. INT. NORA’S DINING ROOM - NORA'S APARTMENT - EVENING Sebastian sets the table with SILVERWARE and PAPER NAPKINS. INT. FRONT DOOR - NORA'S APARTMENT - EVENING Sebastian opens the door and Renee walks in. SEBASTIAN Hi. I'm Sebastian. Sebastian extends his hand and Renee shakes his hand. RENEE Aw, he's so cute... Hi. I'm Renee. INT. NORA’S DINING ROOM - NORA'S APARTMENT - EVENING Sebastian looks at Nora and smirks. Nora rolls her eyes. They all sit at the table that has Tupperware filled with Haitian food. The GRIOT is in a COUNTRY CROCK BEIGE PLASTIC CONTAINER. Nora is fixing Renee a plate. NORA This is griot. It's like fried pork. And this is diri blan and saus pwa. Renee starts eating while Nora fixes a plate for Sebastian. RENEE Thank you, girl. This is so good. Renee stops eating upon seeing Nora prepare Sebastian's plate, and smiles, soaking in the familial love surrounding her. Nora looks at Renee and smiles back. Nora takes a seat and the three of them eat, converse, and laugh. FADE TO BLACK   ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and more. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Schyler Butler is the author of Phantom Hue (forthcoming from CavanKerry Press, 2027). A recipient of funding from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, her work appears in Obsidian , African American Review , Transition , swamp pink , and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University and lives in Columbus, OH.  Girl Says a Prayer   “…my hero felt so bad about himself once that he lit himself on fire…”   –Dave Chappelle - So I toss salt over my shoulder.    I ask for proof and am given a mirror.    I pour the brown but don’t know who for, light a candle and bless the horn-hiding lost of the earth, feed them leftover cake and wonder why these skin splotches come. I send my spit to a foreign lab  and trust they know how to read me.  --     I ask Amma for clues, and She sends  hungry dogs who know where to bite.    I talk all day about the beginning    and whose people were first,   but I wasn’t there. When She allows confusion, I am not thankful until, with practiced faith no longer fragmented, I choose to forgive Her. --- Death would have me bitter for eternity. Death wants me so dehydrated I choose to drink His piss and sing a lullaby of doubt.        ---- When I shut my eyes, I am a child sitting at Grandmother’s feet. Our fingers weave sustenance from threads.   She scatters false indigo on my shoulders. She reads the sticks left by our dead. She lights a candle and holds my chin, says I will tell a different story, one where I consume the fire. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and more. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is a New York Times bestselling novelist and essayist, best known for her novels Wench , Balm , and Take My Hand. Her latest novel, Happy Land, debuted in April 2025. Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Take My Hand (2022), which was awarded a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, and a Fiction award from the Black Caucus American Library Association, and was long-listed for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A three-time nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship, Dolen is widely considered a preeminent chronicler of American historical life. Happy Land chapter 4 - an excerpt Working together was exactly the balm our souls needed in them early months. At night some of us shared stories, unloading what we had brought up the mountain on our backs. Others merely listened, determined to keep their hurt bottled up. Some of our people wanted to go back to South Carolina. It had been our home, after all. But we couldn’t go back. The lie they’d told about us still rang loudly in our ears. Somebody had gotten their hands on a New York newspaper. For some reason, the lie was being printed far and wide. After word got out about us heading north, it was as if they spit on the trail we left behind. Papa believed we got out in the nick of time. One evening after dinner, just before sunset, a meeting for every member of the community was called. We’d built up the settlement so that it encircled a central tree—a massive oak with gnarled branches that the children loved to climb. We sat on the grass, some of us rolling out pallets. A few of the men fashioned rudimentary sitting posts for the elders. We had been in North Carolina for nearly three months, and we was expecting one of our men, Reverend Couch, to return any day with at least a dozen more people. William was the only one standing, his brother, Robert, sitting attentively at his feet. “Good evening,” William began. “I hope y’all don’t mind me calling this meeting. We been here for a while now, but we been so busy working, we ain’t stopped to rest much.” We turned our attention to him. We numbered over forty, so quieting us was no small feat. “I called y’all here because I got something to say, something to . . . suggest.” He said the word as if it was one he had considered beforehand. “I don’t see no reason for us to run this place like how we lived back in Cross Anchor. We get to make our own rules now.” Suggest. What a pretty word. I could barely follow because I was busy turning the sound of it over in my head. “What you talking about, William?” Hal Whitmire asked. “Me and my brother, Robert, we knew our daddy and our daddy’s daddy. They had memories of the home place, and back over there, our people was royalty. They ruled a kingdom. We here on this mountain, in these woods, away from the white man’s government. We make our own government, our own rules. We need to make this place like Africa.” Africa! Laughter arose among us. Did he say Africa? Sure did. William ignored the chatter. “First, we need a ruling council—a group of men to settle disputes, make laws.” Hal shook his head. “A council, huh? I don’t know, William. Ain’t no place in this country the white man’s laws can’t reach. If you saying we make our own country, the South tried to do that during the war, and it’s a lot of them rolling around in their graves ’cause of it.” “I’m not talking about a country,” William responded. “I’m talking about a kingdom.” We rustled, looked around in confusion. But my papa didn’t move, not one inch. He was all ears. William kept on. “I’m just saying the Widow got a lot of land here. And she can’t handle it alone, not without our help. But we can make our own place on it. Our own rules. A kingdom like what we ruled back in the home place.” “What you talking about? We up here starting from nothing. I sold everything I owned to come up that hill,” Hal bellowed. “Look, Hal!” William pointed into the distance. “That turnpike got travelers on it. Just like the Widow getting money, we can, too.” What he talking about money?  More rumblings. “Second thing. We need a treasury.” “Treasure? Like gold?” somebody shouted. “Treasury. A place for our earnings.” I thought of the cloth pouch where I’d kept Papa’s coins back in Cross Anchor. I had been his treasury. I’d never heard this word before, but it felt nice on my lips. William was sharp as a knife, I was realizing. “Everything we earn, we need to put in the kingdom treasury. Don’t we got more if we put it all together?” Everybody began to murmur in agreement, even the women. We knew the power of money even if most of us had never held a paper note in our hands. But I had just heard William use the word kingdom  for the third time, and I was still confused by what he meant. “Right now we working for the Widow to get the inn back up and running. But I hear tell there’s work nearby. Blacksmithing work. Horseshoeing. Carpentry. I know a lot of y’all can earn something round here. We buy our own seed, plant our own crops. Get the things we need.” Our people in Cross Anchor had been skilled, so we knew we could do what he was asking. “What about voting?” Hal Whitmire asked. “We leave it behind,” William said sharply. “We make our own laws up here.” Not vote? Just the thought scared me. Voting was what it meant to be a citizen, a generational wish passed down from our parents and grandparents. It had been the laws that had enslaved us in the first place. Only way to change the law was to vote. Could we really escape this country and all its disorder up here on this mountain? William’s younger brother turned to the group. “I agree with my brother. We can make a life here. And why can’t we work hard and even buy this land one day? We already tried voting and look where it got us. They killed us for it. It’s better to own land.” Now you could hear a fly buzz. Nobody said a word at that. I stared at Robert, curious. How did he expect us to buy land? John Earl Casey, Jola’s daddy, chimed in quietly, his voice shaking with emotion. “The Klan killed my pa for voting. He was eighty-three years old. Eighty-three! I ain’t going back. You tell me how to make a life here for my family and I’ll make it out of nothing with my own two hands.” Papa stood. “I’m with you, William. I’ll help set up the council.” We got real quiet at that, because while William was taking charge, we trusted Papa. He was our spiritual leader. Margaret Couch spoke from her position on top of a blanket. “Whatever the men need, the womenfolk will help,” she said. “But tell me, William. What you mean by kingdom?” At first, William didn’t answer. As I watched the men and women around us digest his dream, his vision for us, I could see that he had inspired belief in the same way he had sold us on the idea of making this trip in the first place. With his words. “I’m saying we make this place a kingdom, just like back in Africa. I’m saying we need to claim our royal robes.” His voice boomed in the clearing. It would be a few more weeks before the council gathered for the first time. But that night William Montgomery planted the seed. And it was a seed that would grow. Excerpt from HAPPY LAND by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Text copyright (c) 2025 by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Dolen Perkins-Valdez and Jae Nichelle on March 24th, 2025. This excerpt from Happy Land is so captivating. What is exciting you most about this latest novel getting into the world? Thank you for the kind words. With this fourth novel, I finally feel that I have settled into my voice as a writer. I know the kinds of stories I want to tell. This novel means a lot to me because it reflects my evolution as a person. It’s so important for all of us to know our family history, myself included. In an Essence interview  about Take My Hand , you mentioned that historical fiction became your life’s work because you “kept getting pulled back into the archives.” Can you share what specifically led you to the subjects you address in Happy Land ? The imagination and audacity of these freedpeople was remarkable. So often this period of Reconstruction, which was certainly marked by violence and intimidation, isn’t portrayed as an era also marked by Black ambition and industriousness. These people dared to live freely among themselves. They dared to purchase over two hundred acres of land. In what ways has your research process for writing projects changed over the years? I used to do all the research alone, with minimal input from local people. Now I know the importance of working with and consulting the locals. This is their story as much as it is America’s story. They have been working to hold these narratives up for many decades before me, and they are due my respect before I set out to write a book about it. For Happy Land , I made the dearest friends with Hendersonville residents who enriched not only this book, but also my life.  You’ve spoken previously about feeling very supported by the Black women writers around you. How early do you share the details of your new work with others? I have a couple of confidants I trust to give me honest opinions about my ideas. One of them, my dear friend Regina Freer, is a professor at Occidental College. She is the reason I wrote Wench , and I have consulted her on every book idea since. If her eyes don’t light up, I’m not writing it. What do you keep on your writing desk or in your workspace that brings you joy? My Palomino Blackwing pencils and Moleskine journals have been my tried-and-true for over a decade. My daughter loves to organize my workspace, and I’m grateful because I’m a bit messy when I’m deep in a project. I always say that my external space may be messy, but my mind is neat. Looking ahead, what themes or stories are you most excited to explore in your future projects? Are there particular aspects of American history or identity that you feel still need more exploration in literature? I don’t know what I’ll encounter in the future. The ideas have to find me because if I go looking for them, the magic can’t happen. I just think it’s important that I continue to read widely, listen thoughtfully, and evolve as a person. Ultimately, what I’m trying to capture is the humanity of Black Americans, and that story always begins with my own humanity. How would you describe your experience of living and teaching in DC? I have the most wonderful students at American University. They teach me far more than I could ever teach them. The celebrated author Edward P. Jones has captured DC far better than I could ever articulate: this place is special. Beyond the political maneuverings of Capitol Hill is a city with heart, love, and tenderness. As a native southerner from Memphis, I have always believed that DC beats with the soul of the South.  How can people support you right now? Thank you for asking this question. Please buy Happy Land  as soon as you’re able. Don’t wait. Early sales are critical for all of us authors. Also, you can join my bookclub by visiting my website . Name another Black woman writer people should know. I’d love to take this opportunity to shout out some debut Black women writers: O.O. Sangoyomi, Sarai Johnson, Afia Atakora, and Kim Coleman Foote. The future of Black women’s novels is bright! ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Jessica Araújo (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of English at the Community College of Rhode Island. She has her MA in Literature and MFA in Creative Writing from William Paterson University.  Her works have been published in Sad Girl Diaries Literary Magazine, Wingless Dreamer, Cathexis Northwest Press, and  Midnight & Indigo. Call More Dead Mama hasn’t rested since the shooting. But not for the same reason as me. When I close my eyes, I see his face disgorging blood on a loop, as if some sick fuck has the VCR remote and keeps rewinding so I can rewatch him spurt blood on his white tee.  Bullet casings littered my driveway, right outside my bedroom window. He could have easily sprayed my bedroom window while he stalked behind my car.  My chest tightens every time I think of it, because what if it happens again and I’m asleep? What if I’m awake? Taking deep breaths to try and relax soon turns into shallow gasps, and I feel like him, like I’m retching on the last breath of life. That’s why I can’t rest.  Mama, she just stares out the window, eyes rooted to where it all went down. “All them candles and pictures, but no one had the sense to put a cross. Calls more dead if there ain’t a cross.” As if Death loitering in the parking lot behind my house is just what I need. Mama squints like she’s trying to see clearer, keeps mumbling to herself. All that squinting she’s doing, I know she can see him. Probably counting how many of the fifty rounds actually hit him. It had sounded like fireworks. We’re used to hearing fireworks. When I heard the racket, I kept sifting through the endless stack of papers analyzing “There Will Come Soft Rains” and how mankind will be its own destruction, and nature will scarcely remember us when we’re gone. The fireworks were a happy distraction. I didn’t clock that it was raining bullets a few yards away.  Until I remembered it was almost October.  Until I looked out the window and saw a black car, headlights off, speed past the stop sign. Until I ran to the window and saw people dust themselves off as they got up off the ground.  Until I saw he was the only one who didn’t get up. “Mmm,” Mama tuts. “That poor boy was no more than nineteen.” “Kevin,” I frown. “The news said his name was Kevin.” “Shame. Look at him, standing there, face covered in blood, disbelieving he’s dead.” Mama doesn’t know I’m scared of ghosts. She could see the dead since she was little, like her mother, her mother’s mother, and the many mothers before them, and like me. I learned conjuring before I learned my ABC’s. I love working with herbs and the elements to heal, to ward, to reverse.  But certain parts of spirit work frighten me. Spirits carry burdens with no vessel to hold them. Sometimes they seep into you and lay anchor, mooring you to their energy—sometimes without permission.  I’m fine with the sporadic visits from my ancestors because they come to protect me. I’m sure they shielded me the night of the shooting. But the dead should stay on the other side. And they mostly do. The ones who tend to linger on this side are the ones who have something gruesome about them, be it their deaths or their intentions. They’re not meant to stay on this side of the veil. Staying too long risks them turning to haunt. That’s why I’m scared of ghosts. A spirit doesn’t stay, but a ghost refuses to go, and it grows more dangerous the longer they’re here.  Mama won’t budge from the window, barely moving like a sentinel on guard. “You need to seek some help, baby. You can’t swallow this and think you won’t fall to shit. I came here because you need me, but you know I can’t stay too long. Besides, some things I can’t protect you from.” “I just need to move out of here,” I groan over my fifth mug of chamomile.  “I didn’t know moving erases traumas. What you need is help.” “What I need is sleep.” They come sometime after midnight. Mama and I watch from the window—from a sliver between the shades—in the kitchen. I had turned off all the lights, hoping to invite sleep. We watch three guys smash the candles lit in vigil for Kevin. One of them is filming it all with his phone. They all laugh when one of them whips out his dick and pees on the large picture of the dead guy whose ghost phases through their unwavering bodies. Kevin roars in the leader’s face, and I feel the ripples through the window, though they feel nothing—or pretend not to. It doesn’t take a conjurer to arrive at my next thought¸  That’s Kevin’s murderer.    The news reported no leads as no one wanted to testify. The neighbors murmured how his brother, who had stormed onto the scene too late for Kevin, and was said to be the real target, would seek “street justice.” But a week later, here the killer is laughing it up with his boys like getting away with murder is the world’s funniest joke. And maybe it is. After all, what is a life worth? He tries to shove them all away from his makeshift memorial. His rage thrums in my chest. Fortunately, he is too recently dead to turn vengeful. We can see it, though, Mama and I, how he wants to be the death of that guy and the losers applauding him. He will turn to haunt if he doesn’t move on.  Choking back sobs of impotence, I wipe my eyes and crouch down by the refrigerator, wanting to scream but scared that the killer might hear. That I might be next. My face is flushed with a million tingles that feel like spiders scurrying across my cheeks. The walls start closing in on me, and suddenly there isn’t enough air in the world for my lungs as I try to gulp enough oxygen to stay afloat, but all I keep thinking is that I might be next, might be next, will be next. “Don’t be silly,” Mama sighs, as if reading my mind. “You don’t even know that guy. Why would he hurt you?” Because he can. He already has my peace in a vice grip and doesn’t even know it. Imagine how he’d act if he knew. He’d piss on my pain for sport. Counting to ten, I focus on the kitchen table, on the vase of wilting roses in dirty water, taking deep inhales and slow exhales in between numbers. Inhale peace, exhale worry. I am safe, I am safe. I am safe.  When I reach ten, my breathing steadies enough for fear to take a backseat to the wave of anger rippling through my body. My upper lip curls as a snarl escapes from behind my gritted teeth. My tongue feels dry and heavy in my mouth, parched with a new thirst. For blood. “Mina,” Mama cautions. “Don’t.” “I need to end this, Mama,” I roar, tired of her just standing there. “You saw the same as me. Kevin’s going to turn vengeful as soon as he’s strong enough. I can end this right now.” What I don’t say is that I don’t blame Kevin for wanting revenge. That bastard stole his life. He shot into a packed park and didn’t care if he hit anyone else. Now he comes back and taunts the living by defacing the dead. Now I want him dead too. “Don’t you go turning vengeful now. You’re still alive. You’d be more dangerous than any old ghost.” “I know,” I smirk, knowing that I am powerful enough to bring a killer to his knees, to bring justice to a ghost. Invigorated by the current of rage, I pop into my bedroom to grab what I know will quench my new thirst. A conjurer has many tools, and I learned to use them all. After collecting what I need into a sling bag, I grab a ski mask and a hoodie from my closet.  “You’ll only fuel him with this, Mina. And you’ll hurt yourself. I can’t guarantee I can help you if you go down this road.” Ignoring her, I disable the security system and crouch out of the side door to the driveway. I slink down behind my car, just like witnesses say the killer did, and watch them. They are passing a blunt between them while Kevin crackles like an old TV. His ghost has grown. His wavelength is like a strong radio signal, and I am tuned all the way in.  I mix a few ingredients—knotted string, High John, and hemlock— into a small cloth bag, whisper a brief incantation, and fling it over my car to the basketball court. I’m right behind the bag, knowing they won’t have a breath to react after the pouch detonates. One of them notices me and reaches for something in his pants, but a silent flash goes off and they are all swept across broken glass and stomped bouquets to the same spot where I watched a cop give Kevin CPR until the ambulance arrived, until he died before it came. “What the fuck?” the murderer exclaims. The others are probably questioning if it is the high, if their blunt was laced, because they look confused, lost. “You murderer!” I hiss, my voice sounding deep, guttural, not my own.  “Who the hell are you? How are you doing this?” He struggles against invisible bonds, but it is futile. Until I release the spell, they can’t move. And they won’t be able to when I release it either.  Like a flower girl at the world’s saddest wedding, I scatter petals of wolf’s bane around us, uttering an incantation to conjure a cloak of invisibility. Even if they squinted hard in our direction, no one would see us, and not even a bat would hear us. “Now, we can have some fun,” I leer. “You ready, Kevin?” He looks at me, confusion spreading across his blood-stained face. I squeeze my eyes together to shut out the memory of him spurting blood and choking on air as he died. “Y-you can see me?” “Better than see you,” I wink, my voice still gruff. “I can help you.” “Yo, who are you talking to?” someone says from the ground.  “Help me what?” Kevin continues, ignoring the grumblings of the others. He approaches slowly, cautiously, his wavelength piercing my skin as he does. “Get revenge,” my lips stay parted as I hiss the words, my tongue firmly rooting to the roof of my mouth. The words are titillating, exciting me for what’s to come next.  Kevin’s ghost flickers brighter as he mirrors my sneer. He gets so close I could wipe the blood from his ashen cheeks if he were still flesh. The current of anger gets stronger, exciting and nauseating like sailing through a hurricane. He reaches for my hand, unable to touch me, but oh, I can feel him. I can feel  him. I can feel him. He lays anchor in me, and I see it all, a game of dice, a livestream from the park, the sound of fireworks, realizing it isn’t fireworks, a pinch in the shoulder, another in the chest, another—I break the connection. I don’t want to see. I don’t want to know. I want to let go. I want to… I bowl over and vomit bile that smells like chamomile and regret. What am I doing?  I look back at the guys on the floor, at Kevin who is now hovering over them. I can’t focus. I’ve never channeled the dead, always avoiding mediumship out of fear a ghost would lay hold of me and never leave. Now, Kevin’s rage has latched onto my own, overpowered my own, and has made it foreign, has made my body attempt to eject anything that steals my control. The nausea of fighting possession is too much for me.  “Let’s kill them all,” he says in a grating voice not unlike mine. “Right where he killed me.” Pointing his fingers like a gun, he mock-shoots each guy in turn, but it’s my chest that jolts. Clutching my knees, I bend over and vomit again. This isn’t the way. My body keeps trying to unmoor itself from the weight of Kevin’s energy. I cannot be his vessel.  “Revenge ain’t justice, baby,” Mama’s voice echoes throughout the dome. I look up, relieved that she’s here, come to make me right, but she is focused on Kevin. “Who are you?” He whirls on Mama. “You can see me too?” “I can,” Mama nods, approaching him slowly. “And I can tell you that killing them won’t help you find peace. “I had peace until this asshole came and took it from me,” he says, kicking right through the torso of his killer. But the guy flinches, as if he felt something. Latching onto me has made Kevin stronger. “I shouldn’t be dead!”  “You shouldn’t,” I say, fighting a renewed wave of nausea. “It’s not fair what happened to you. It’s not fair he keeps getting to go around and do more hateful things.” “But,” I continue when I see him clench his fists, his eyes stirring the rage in me once more. I swallow it and continue, “Killing them here would tie them to this place, just like you’re tied to it. And if you stay here and we add them to the mix, horrible things might happen to more innocent people. There’ll be more dead here, more people dying, and some of them might even be your own family.” He softens a bit when I mention his family, easing my nausea a bit, and mutters, “But he can’t get away with this.” “And he won’t. I said I can help you, and I will, but you need to move on. You’ll get justice, I promise.” His ghost dims, the frequency weak enough for me to break it with a quick incantation. Our connection severs, and I gasp for air, lungs heaving as if recovering from almost drowning. My body feels untethered until I focus on a shard of glass on the ground. Inhale peace, exhale worry. I am safe, I am safe. I am safe.   Mama takes the chance to reach for Kevin’s hand. Flinching at first, then dropping into her embrace, Kevin cries into her shoulder, and I want to run and join them, to lose this past week in a hug. Mama calms him so easily, but I know she won’t always be here to ease our hurts. Sighing, I remind myself I can’t fall apart again. Spirit work takes resolve. Living takes resolve. I cast a sleep spell over the three losers on the floor. I’ll deal with them later. “I’ll be right back,” I say as I jog back to my apartment. The dead-end street is dead silent at this hour, and for the first time in a week, it isn’t disquieting. I dart to my room and lift my mattress, leaning it against the wall so I can yank two loose slats from my bed frame. They’re far enough from each other that they won’t disrupt my sleep, if I can ever reclaim it. As I pull at the pieces of wood, I wonder if a mattress can slow a bullet. Each strike of the hammer sounds like a gunshot, startling me each time it hits the nail, even though it’s me doing it. Tears burn in my eyes as I hammer harder than I should, not caring if I hit my hand. When I finish hammering the last nail, I notice the angle of one slat is a little crooked, but a cross is a cross. I fill my sling bag with florida water, rue, ammonia, coffee grounds, a lighter, and a white seven-day candle. The cross is longer than me, but not heavy, so I manage to place it in the crook of my armpit. Back at the basketball court, Mama is holding Kevin’s hands, consoling him in a way she can no longer console me. Whatever she is doing is working. His ghost no longer flickers like an old television. Actually, he’s gaining some of his old color back, with blood smeared across a ruddy brown face. He’s more spirit than ghost now. But he still has to go. The longer he stays among the living, the greater the chance his spirit will get too far gone to be saved.  I take the florida water and sprinkle it on the cross and in a circle around us. Speaking prayer and liberation over the area, I sweep shards of glass and candle wax aside with my sneaker and stand the cross against the fence, positioning it so it won’t fall over, bending over to slap the ground in front of it three times to call on Spirit and my guides. Once I feel myself drop in, connecting to the spiritual energy on the other side, I am separated from the anger and panic of the past week, my tether to Kevin completely severed. I am just a blade of grass swaying in the breeze.  Rubbing rue and coffee grounds together, I call on the most high and my spiritual team to allow me to work in the name of all that is good, to free all the dead holding on to this place past their time, to cleanse this space of any residue of evil here. I sprinkle the rue and coffee mixture in the four directions, followed by three drops of ammonia. After lighting the candle, I hold it above my head, turning as I present it north, east, south, and west. Then, I kneel, eyes closed and palms to the sky, and continue praying as my body continues humming with spiritual energy. A white light grows around Mama and Kevin when I finish my prayer.  Hesitant at first, Kevin takes Mama’s proffered hand and lets her guide him into the veil. He looks back at me, nodding as he dissolves into the brilliance of the beyond. “You find your peace too now. I’m more comfortable protecting you from the other side, so don’t make me come back,” she admonishes with a smile as she fades into light. Body still swaying, I rise from the ground and fight the urge to reach for Mama, knowing it’s futile to try and touch her one last time, so I place my hands over my heart and nod. Breathing deeply as I ground myself, I rub my hands and neck with florida water and walk back to the house. I inhale deeply, feeling more peace than I have in weeks. And more resolve. Back in my apartment, I call the police and report the vandalization of the memorial and how I heard them bragging about killing Kevin.  “They’re still there,” I say to dispatch, which is true—I didn’t undo their bonds. I don’t release the dome of invisibility until I hear the sirens, and I don’t release the binding spell until I see the cops through my kitchen window, struggling to lift them off the ground. Relief manifests itself in the form of tears streaming down my face, and I cry until, for the first time in a week, I collapse onto my bed and finally rest.  ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Deanna Whitlow is the founder of Same Faces Collective . She completed her MFA in Fiction at Columbia College Chicago. Pushcart-nominated, her stories and essays have been published by Raging Opossum Press, Allium Journal , Black Fox Literary, Identity Theory, Mulberry Literary,  and others. The Laundress And the work can be beautiful sometimes. I think this as I sip coffee in the darkness of dawn. I believe this in the same tentative, wanting way I believe in God. I look at my hands. I have scrubbed and wrung and ironed so much that my hands are my winter shade all year round. The skin between my index and middle finger could pass the paper bag test. My palms itch. There must be money on the way. Yes, the work is beautiful. I make things clean. Like a pastor. Or a rushing stream. I have even reconciled its endlessness because I am still catching up on my mother’s and her mother’s and her mother’s mother’s old burdens. The ritual of it is a little like prayer so sometimes, the work itself is God. And God is beautiful. So the work is beautiful. I smile. The work is beautiful, so I wake earlier then I need. Before the children and the sun and the radio evangelists. I fill my cup, drink slowly, and pretend I am the sort of woman who gets to wonder what else there is to do when the coffee is finished. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.