The Day I Learned I Wasn’t Woke I moved out of the south almost twenty years ago and rarely ventured back — what I found when I did punctured my safe little bubble. My south was pretty classic. I grew up in a small tobacco farming town, my sharecropper ancestors didn’t venture far from home, everyone did…

Learning So Slowly The quiet night of a snow day, the light fading so slowly. If there’s a car out there, you hear it approach from so far away, every tire slowly slowly crunching down the street, slushing and sloughing. The whoosh of a sliding door upstairs. The scratchy click of a cheap…

Too Valuable to Lose When did this become okay with me? Was it when I was fifteen, and my uncle grabbed my breast while I was standing in the cold blast of grandmother’s freezer? …