Heads of the Colored People

As a funeral singer, she had more gigs than she wanted and paid for the fertility treatments on her own with the profits, though it seemed wrong to call them that.

Kevan wore a black T-shirt that said in white letters, “Eff Your Respectability Politics.” He liked the irony of the word “eff” instead of the F-word, but he still debated whether it was better to change “your” to “yo.” He wasn’t sure if anyone understood the stakes in these decisions or in any of his other art, which he sold online, from his car, and occasionally from a small suitcase in the barbershop on Washington Avenue.

And what is a black network narrative but the story of one degree of separation, of sketching the same pain over and over, wading through so much flesh trying to draw new conclusions, knowing that wishing would not make them so?

When Alma first started at the hospital, some of the nurses taught her to pray for the children according to severity. A level one meant pray that the child would be well; level two meant pray for decreased pain. Alma was slow to understand level three--praying that the children would die, that mercy and grace would shorten their suffering--but she had come around to it a few months into her job, when the boy with the shattered face was wheeled in. His mother's eyes convinced Alma that sometimes you suffered more the longer you lived.

Marjorie was only thirty-seven, but she felt older than her peers; some of them would say she felt better than them, too. But that wasn't true. If anything, she felt inferior for all the many ways she failed at keeping herself unspotted from the world.

She did not want to be one of those people who went to therapy for the rest of their lives, blathering on about what "my therapist said" or "what we uncovered in therapy." It struck Marjorie that those people never got any better; they just used longer and more complicated phrases to say things.

She knew that she should feel discontentment, connected to a large chain of disenfranchisement or systemic persecution--it's not that black death and the news of the world didn't touch her spirit--but she was somewhat ashamed to say, in therapy or publicly, that the bulk of her discontentment came from having very little about which to be discontented.