Tag: anthology

When your greatest shame is also what makes you free

The spring before I left the Bronx to go to boarding school, to accept a scholarship that would change the entire trajectory of my life, I had an abortion. I was 15.

I was raised a devout Catholic; I’ve always been a deeply spiritual person. But I also had been so desperately lonely for such a long time. My high school boyfriend was a dumb ass and so was I. But he was lonely, too, in a different way. Poverty, violence, rage: They make you want the instant gratification it seems that sex can provide when you’re young.

I got pregnant not long after my mother had a manic episode during which she threatened to kill me. I’d run away from home to my best friend’s apartment in the projects as a temporary solution, to gather my thoughts. That was the weekend, when I was 14, that I first had sex. Looking for safety, a home, somewhere, with someone.

I had been keeping a journal daily for at least six months up to that point. When I told social workers I’d applied to boarding school, that I didn’t want to go home because it wasn’t safe, but I just needed a few more months to figure something out, they told me I could go to a group home, but it was unlikely that I could go to boarding school from any group home.

Reluctantly, I returned home. When she tried to hit me again, I held her wrists. “The next time you hit me, I will hit you back.”

It was a small win compared to what came next, which was that she found my journal, which, because I was an idiot, detailed how ambivalent I was about a future I didn’t know I could believe in. On one hand, I believed that if I had a baby, my boyfriend would always have to love me, and it would mean on some level that at least two people — he and the child — would have to love me. Right?

On the other, I have never wanted to be a mother. I have seen what this world does to Black babies. I am named for one who was killed at 12. A day does not pass when one is not harassed, though these days, it feels lucky that they are not murdered.

My mother’s discovery of my journal triggered our visit to Planned Parenthood, where she recited her rosary, loudly, while we waited to see the doctor. This was, for the doctors, a red flag, that she would be so bold. They saw us separately — in retrospect, I don’t know if this was legal or not. Is it safe, they wondered, to tell her that you’re pregnant?

“Absolutely not,” I said, shaking my head.

When they called her in, they lied to her. I lied to her on the day that I went to have the abortion with one of my Catholic school classmates. I have never cried so much or so hard in my life as I did as I mourned my deepest shame.

By then, the packet of summer reading for my first year at the new elite school had arrived in the mail. I had stopped writing things down. I was going to read my way to my future.

Continue reading “When your greatest shame is also what makes you free” →

Notes from the Bronx Book Festival

I wrote about the Bronx Book Festival for the Village Voice and how the Bronx is having a resurgence of the book scene with the work and leadership of Saraceia J. Fennell and Noelle Santos, but there were a couple of quotes from one of the panels that I wanted to add in the spirit of Throwback Thursday that didn’t fit in the context of the story that I wanted to put here.

  • “In this nation, the women’s movement was started by Black women. If we’re going to create a movement in this country that’s inclusive, we have to acknowledge indigenous women who get erased, and Black women specifically. That’s still not understood, which is why we struggle with solidarity. If your movement doesn’t lift all boats, we’re not going to win.”  — Sofia Quintero

 

  • “A large part of resistance is rejecting rejection…Part of the feminist project, especially in the arts, is a more liberating masculinity. It’s not that they don’t have privilege. Our feminism has to be one that heals and liberates everyone. We have to inform the brothers, but the brothers gotta do their own labor.” — Roya Marsh is one of the poets in the beautiful Black Girl Magic anthology, which you can buy here.
BronxBookFestHaul.JPG
I went a little overboard, but it was the first Bronx Book Festival, so what can I say? These are all Bronx authors, some books I bought from The Lit. Bar tent and a few that were given to attendees, plus my press pass which I will cherish for life. 

Coming Soon — All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color

My life is now complete with the possibility that Junot Diaz actually may have possibly read my work to come up with this blurb. But even if not, I’m thrilled to have my short story, Sirens, included in this amazing anthology. (You can hear an excerpt at my friend Stacia’s great Bellow series link.)

Here’s more info about the collection, and the amazing company I get to be in:

All about Skin features twenty-seven stories by women writers of color whose short fiction has earned them a range of honors, including John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award, and inclusion in the Best American Short Stories and O. Henry anthologies. The prose in this multicultural anthology addresses such themes as racial prejudice, media portrayal of beauty, and family relationships and spans genres from the comic and the surreal to startling realism. It demonstrates the power and range of some of the most exciting women writing short fiction today.

The stories are by American writers Aracelis González Asendorf, Jacqueline Bishop, Glendaliz Camacho, Learkana Chong, Jennine Capó Crucet, Ramola D., Patricia Engel, Amina Gautier, Manjula Menon, ZZ Packer, Princess Joy L. Perry, Toni Margarita Plummer, Emily Raboteau, Ivelisse Rodriguez, Metta Sáma, Joshunda Sanders, Renee Simms, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Hope Wabuke, and Ashley Young; Nigerian writers Unoma Azuah and Chinelo Okparanta; and Chinese writer Xu Xi.