Memphis

by Tara M. Stringfellow

For years in this country there was no one for black men to vent their rage on except black women.

And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

Talking Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, they agreed how none of them, not a single one of those white boys, could write a sentence as good as Zora Neale Hurston.

Laughter that was, in and of itself, Black. Laughter that could break glass. Laughter that could uplift a family. A cacophony of Black female joy in a language private to them.

That is what broke Miriam. Where shame met motherhood. She had snapped at her child for simply wanting to exist as a child.

“Free?” Her laugh was steeped in the same bitterness when I had asked her about God. “A Black woman hasn’t ever known the meaning of that word, my love.”

History had awakened me to the fact that racism is the only food Americans crave.