The men and women of the Causon Creek Church of God with Signs Following were expecting families from congregations all over the South to attend their annual homecoming services, some from hundreds of miles away. Most would cross the Tennessee border from North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky, though a few were coming from states…
a novel excerpt She lost me as the nation was losing Richard Nixon, good riddance, whose head bobbled on his neck like a newborn’s, as mine would have, but whose five o’clock shadow was like the truth coming out. A loss to no one but himself. She sought for me early in the Ford…
1. In the yard of the children’s prison the fruit on the solitary tree is blue shriveled beyond recognition At the turn of the last century the inmates (aged 7 to 13) pickpockets petty thieves & vandals ate gruel from wooden bowls and slept on iron cots gazing down from their cells at that tree…
Mrs. Venkataraman had never seen a black man before. There they were in the arrival lounge at Murtala Muhammad Airport, with their coal-black skins and eyes, pawing through their passports, looking for the residence visas her husband’s university had obtained for them, shaking their heads and laughing loudly, saying Eh-hehn Eh-hehn over and over again….
The song of someone like me begins on the penny whistle. A few notes, just a few, up and down. The bass line comes in, then the lead and second guitar. Brushstrokes on the snares. And then the singer, Lord, then the singer steps up. What voice could slip this backdrop? Only the rise and…
I live in the USA, where we take Our right to pray / not to pray As fundamental, as unalienable. My friend prays what he calls fake prayers And wonders if these prayers are doomed To fall on deaf ears because they are full Of fake, prayers of one who will not be sincere. My…
Arriving in December on a Greyhound from Paducah, you saw the usual sun rising on your right over the bowed houses of Dearborn as a wafer of moon descended on your left behind the steaming rail yards wakening for work. “Where are we?” you asked. In 1948 people still talked to each other even when…
As a child, as little more than an infant still learning numbers and words, I went to sleep after praying for uncles and aunts, for the living and the dead, with one hand in my mother’s hand through the bars of the cot, while I held in the other a bronze statuette of Mary given…
“Everything changes but the avant-garde.” —Paul Valéry A few words are left us from the beginning. Thank you, God, for allowing me a little to think again this morning. Touch my face, touch this scarred heart. Here, touch this upturned face as wind as light. So they labored for three or four decades to turn…
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