fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
A megathrust earthquake struck on June 22, 1996. Mom died. So powerful an event, I knew it had happened without solid confirmation. The nurses kindly said that there had been no change in my mother’s condition, though the pauses in their speech told me what they did not want to say. Later that morning, I…
In one of my Civil Rights History classes way back when, the professor explained why the NAACP very specifically took up the case of Rosa Parks as a means of challenging the Jim Crow era bus segregation laws. She had been a secretary for the organization for a number of years and had an unimpeachable…
In the numbing haze in which I found myself on that fateful day in June 1996 when Mom died, I managed to focus while packing for the trip to L.A. to join my family on that which was most important: Music. In those pre-MP3, pre-iPod days, I carted about a dozen or so CDs with…
Young black kids are killing and dying in the streets. Gun fire echoes on quiet nights, on busy streets, in daylight — bodies fall to the ground. Killers stand over the fallen triumphantly and pump in more and more. Then they run away. But it’s not OK to snitch. Young black kids trying to get…
