Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

In her time away she had conquered nothing. She had merely found a way to be.

It was her first day, and if she didn’t mingle with the other teachers now, when would she ever? The young white teachers seemed to think she was one of them, and so did the older black women. She couldn’t imagine camaraderie with either group, so she unwrapped her sandwich and stayed put in the room.

“It’s a shame that making room for white folks mean the rest of us have to go. But it’s always been that way, hasn’t it?”

The curls were Ralph’s fault,

“I never believed any of that stuff—the primal bond, mothers and daughters. It sounds like a convenient excuse, a way for a mother to always defend herself—But I gave you life. As if that matters. As if I care.”

Mirella rolled her eyes as Penelope quoted Ralph. The People need their music, Mirella. It’s not just me—it’s all for The People. Ralph and Lionel’s speeches about blackness and Brooklyn, entrepreneurship, all centered on The People, the community that needed their businesses. The People thrived when they thrived. After all her years in Brooklyn, Mirella had come to know buildings and strangers, her daughter, the neighbors, the men who worked at the drugstore, Ralph and his friends. She had yet to meet The People.

She might have been a curator, or an assistant to a famous foreign artist, or maybe she was still just painting, living off her parents’ money.

“You were never really mine,” Mirella said, and she turned away from Penelope’s room and walked down the hall, without feeling her feet touch the floor.

Mirella was more alive than any of them. She had left so that she could live.

how we do things we do not mean; we do evil things; if we see an open door, we will dart through it, before we lose our guts, no matter who is left behind, we will move at the chance to be free.