That was the winter the city hired two guys to demolish by hand our neighbor's arsoned house— chimney, foundation, beams on the second floor. All January they worked with a tea kettle whistling on a trash fire, a boom box full of James Brown “feeling good.” I didn't, sitting in my coat cheering through a…
A speech delivered on June 12, 1990 in Tokyo at the American Center. First of all, may I present two stories from two different parts of my own country. One month ago, in Iowa, I went with my next-door neighbor, Cheryl Huang, to attend her swearing-in ceremony as a new American citizen. Cheryl is of…
—Here, Dad laughs and I shoot my arm straight out into Sunday. Sax-honks rock the radio. I wheel this Chevy in sunlight, roll off onto a long, disappearing country road. In the rearview a cloud of our best summer is pouring up behind. —Easy, he says. Easy. It goes forever. He's here to show me…
Dearest K., I dream of houses burning, skeletons of houses, row upon row of charred frames of houses crumbling like the ash of a cigar. I walk the streets as if their planned and crisscrossed patterns could contain a human life, as if that life would not spill over. How long have you been dead?…
That citizens of color must confront racism daily in America's traditionally white power culture is no news: nor is it news that white citizens, for the most part, being able to, are more likely to ignore and to evade both their own racism and that of so-called minorities which is directed towards them. By inclination,…
I didn't intend to walk the old road at midnight but there I was, surprised to see my faint shadow on the dirt. I looked up to that open moon coming down through all the mist. A few more steps and there lay my shadow across a jack rabbit dead on the road. I whispered…
At first there's greenish flesh until the knob's turned farther to the right, and then the flesh turns paler, pink; the gray walls behind the silent faces shimmer, and next the sound's turned up, the lips are moving, the hands, the voices, rising, moving— is this…
The question I am asked, as a teacher and writer, is: Why do you read Native American literature? What is your justification or rationale for studying the thought and cultures of American native peoples? Not merely enjoying or appreciating, but actually studying, immersing yourself in it? Likewise, you might wonder, how much of the Plains…
Barbarians were churning the farms into mud, polluting our wells. I had to escape. This was 1969. I was thirteen years old, hiding in the basement. The frayed plastic webbing of my father's green lounge chair tickled my legs, which were only half-shaped-curved here, blockish there. A photo from Life was taped to the window:…
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