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Wiping the Slate Clean

You know when you’ve solved a complex calculus equation, and you take the eraser and literally wipe the slate clean? I did that last week with my writing career. Three acceptances triggered the erasure: First, I was accepted into the Community Writers Workshop in the Virtual Valley for July of this year. This fabulous writers...

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So You Love that Racist Movie?

Scene I Y’all, Gone with the Wind was my first grown-up movie (that means my first movie that wasn’t a Saturday morning matinee where my friends and I ran up and own the aisles acting like fools). We went at night, my mother and two sisters and I. Watching this movie I learned a very important plot point. During the burning of...

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Do You Know Your Patterns of Racism?

All the news about attacks on Asian Americans, I wanted to speak out. So I began writing a blog post, and soon enough, I took a hard turn and found myself re-hashing our national history of white racism toward Black folks, with some scant references to indentured Chinese. I wrote, and I revised, and somehow I couldn’t get it right. Then I...

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Beignets, Names, and Future Wins

Today, we took our grandsons to the cafe au lait and beignets place. Inside the place, I mean. Except for one, two times, I haven’t been inside a restaurant for 12 months. We ordered three plates of beignets and one croissant because it was an after-school snack, and the beignets might not have been sufficient, thus the...

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The Gifted Young Professional

In the summer of 1981, when I was clerking at the Wise Carter law firm in Jackson, Mississippi, and living at my grandmother’s house, I walked the five blocks to my job in downtown Jackson. Pedestrian commuting was not the rule in Jackson, but my other option was to drive Bigmama’s 1965 land shark Cadillac, fondly known as “Big Blue.“ At that...

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Ha, ha! My Own Purple Martin House!

Generations ago, the Morris family became hosts for Purple Martins. When the ladies and gents of the Purple Martin family would travel through Jackson, Mississippi, on their way from South America to the eastern United States, they always stopped over at the Morris Ice Company. Grandaddy Morris made sure of that. He put up houses for the...

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