Blood at the Root

by LaDarrion Williams

I’d always heard that Black boys don’t read. Maybe that’s why sports are pushed so hard on Black males or why so many educators push them through the system without proper accommodations.

Clock it

There’s no use in holding on to bad memories when you can make new ones.

Pain builds everything in this world, and pain is all that’s left when everything’s been stolen from you.

They say love is like the sea. Because of its vastness, we really don’t understand it fully. But we know it moves with a rhythm, and it’s deeper than anything in this world.

“Voodoo, which is from the original word Vodun, is a religious belief system originating in Africa. The motherland. Whereas Hoodoo is a derivative of the teachings of Vodun. Enslaved folks and their descendants took what they learned in their native ways and modernized it and mixed it with Christian ideology. The origins being from Kongo/Igbo.”

Black folks and watermelon actually have a positive relationship. Back in the Reconstruction era, Black farmers sold watermelon as a means of income. Profited greatly because of it. Some even became millionaires. White people grew jealous of this self-sufficiency, Malik, and deemed watermelon as this stereotypical and uncouth thing that Black people eat.

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We’re always taught the game of forgive and forget, but nobody never talks about how that shit just seeps into you, and the trophy you win is pain and enduring trauma that other folks put on you.