Ordinary Hazards

Trauma is a memory hog, It gobbles up all available space in the brain, leaves little room to mark daily happenstances, or even routine injuries which are less than life-threatening.

I didn't have much in the world, but my fears were my own.

MY BLACK ME My father fed me Invisible Man, Native Son, No Longer at Ease, Black Man's Burden, and the more I read, the madder I got, and I already had reason to scream, but my father kept me dreaming of what words I might bring to the world.

this writing thing was some kind of magic trick I didn't yet understand, except for this: Magicians rarely share their secrets.

memoir is a tricky business. Unlike an autobiography, a memoir’s focus is on truth, not fact. For example, two or more people can share the exact same experience, and yet come away with radically different memories of that experience. Is one person’s memory right and the other wrong? No. The memory of each person is true for him or her. A memoir, then, is a very personal, inherently subjective story recalling incidents that have shaped and impacted one person’s life. Even at that, a memoir, again unlike an autobiography, tells the story of a fragment of a life, not the whole of it. Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir is a snippet of my story, and it is my story, alone.