and i am the man / laughing: “I Have No Name for my Father”

Image: Black Boy Booty, posted at Flickr by nathanmac87 under a Creative Commons License.

We are who we are because of those who made us, or so we’ve been told. We model our lives in the shadows and the halos of our parents, and their parents before them: it’s part of what makes us get through the hard, hard grift of living, sometimes — this notion that we’re acting for our legacy, and in defense of the legacy left for us. Be the kind of woman your mother would be proud to call daughter, or, ...