They say the land remembers. Maybe that’s why I kept coming back, to the red dirt riverbeds, to the trails where cedar smoke used to hang like breath in winter. I didn’t grow up with a map of who we were. I grew up with silences. My grandfather, Wilson, was ...

I was eight years old when I first understood what it meant to be different. It was a Tuesday morning, crisp and cool like most in Butte, Montana. The frost still clung to the windows when I walked to school, my breath curling in clouds around my scarf. I liked ...

I’ve seen hunger walk through a front door like it owned the place. 1932. My youngest hadn’t eaten in two days, and I was staring at a war medal that couldn’t be traded for bread. I served in France in 1918. Dug trenches with frozen fingers, carried buddies with blown-out ...

I was 14 when I saw George Floyd die on my phone screen. 15 when I marched downtown. 16 when I got tear-gassed for holding a sign that read “Am I next?” Justice isn’t theoretical for my generation. It’s urgent. It’s now. They told us we were too young to ...

My father kept his boots by the door until the day he died. They were scuffed, sun-bleached, and one of the soles had separated near the toe, but he never threw them out. Said they reminded him of who he’d once been—and what he survived. He didn’t talk much about ...

I was eight the year the wheat turned to dust. My father said it was the worst of the bad years, though I didn’t understand how the sky could be that blue and still hold so much sorrow. We lived on the flat edge of Kansas, where wind came without ...

When the fever hit 102, I started bargaining with God. We’d made it seven months into lockdown without getting sick. I was working from home, Mom had moved into our guest room, and we did everything right—wiped groceries, masked indoors, kept windows open. But the virus didn’t care. One morning, ...

I watched the nurse zip up my mother’s body from the other side of a glass wall. We were only supposed to visit virtually, but I fought for five minutes. Five sacred minutes. My mother was 89, a retired teacher who survived polio, integration, and three miscarriages. She taught three ...

I used to hate the mango tree. It grew wild in the back corner of the strip mall where my parents ran a laundromat—wedged between a dumpster and the parking lot, its roots cracked the pavement and dropped fruit that stained the concrete dark and sticky. It smelled like sweat ...

We met in the second row of Bible study, both of us scribbling in notebooks instead of listening to Pastor Ray’s sermon about the loaves and fishes. Jordan was Catholic. I was Baptist. We debated saints, sang hymns differently, and prayed with our eyes open just to be rebellious. One ...