“How to be a Black Author”

You chose this program based on money and because you never had a Black person of any gender teach you anything about writing or reading. You learned math and Black Studies and the safest way to blow and push life into another person from other Black people, but none of them had taught you how to tell a story. There is a family legend about how you learned how to read, that one day you were sitting at a kitchen table, four years old, beads in your hair because you were fresh back from a visit to your Mom-Mom’s, and you said something like, “Good morning.

Lasagna,” and your parents realized you were reading a comic aloud to yourself. Reading came to you like a sudden burst into fruit brought forth by unseen winds. Sometimes, creating one doesn’t take generations upon generations.

It can be established, at least in the arts, with the right, thoughtful conversation or idea passed around a table in two hours and forty-five minutes on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. I want to tell you that you’ll make it through this year. The first time you all met as a class that semester, your most boring white classmate turned in a story that was about himself but named something cooler like “Alistair” or “Parker.” Last year, you had read an infamous essay about women and likability that he had found offensive.

You had personally found the essay a little boring in the duh-yes-of course way essays can be when they take on something you have personally experienced. The only marginalia you had bothered to write was Girl, you are preaching to the choir. But this classmate had gotten somehow so upset with the author’s phrasing, the way she treated men, that he had cried in the classroom.

You had seen him lurking outside of after-class Guinnesses—the cheapest beer in the happy hour special—crying still, face mottled red, and typing something on his cell phone. All his stories were about young, misunderstood white men gazing at water and thinking about misdeeds that they never actually did in-scene. You and your friends sometimes called him Mr.

Sometimes, you called him Mr. You listened to how your Black professor told him that his descriptions were “miraculous.” She talked about Carver and interplays of emotion and reality and wasn’t water ancestral? Her hair was thick and natural.