Hilton Als

Once she told me that when she was a young single mother raising her two boys, she would look in on her children as they slept. Here, Toni, the former student-actress, would clutch at her blouse to convey wonder and self-sacrifice as she looked down at her children. “This is the view I had of myself then,” she said, the laughter starting to bubble up in her chest. Because, the truth is, her kids weren’t having it. Indeed, one of her boys asked her not to roam around the room like that at night,…

The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on her shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach—could not even see—but which filled the valley of the mind. Spectacular even alongside other early novels bat…

Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the inf…

It’s precisely the absence of those easy markers—the triumph of good over evil, truth lighting the way—that makes the poet and activist Carolyn Forché’s work chilling and unique. For a large part of her career, Forché, who is now sixty-nine, has been characterized as a political poet. Which she is, though she prefers the term “poetry of witness.” Her poems ask again and again, What can we do with what we see and live through? They help us to consider our memories of Auschwitz or an image of immi…

Privacy was something my sisters had to get used to. Our new house had doors and a proper sitting room, which sometimes served as a makeshift bedroom for visiting Bajan relatives. (My mother’s family was from Barbados.) The sister I was closest to, a poetry-writing star who wore pencil skirts to play handball with the guys, composed her verse amid drifts and piles of clothes and kept her door closed. My brother and I shared a smaller room and a bed. My mother had her own room, where the door was…

When we meet Rainey, she’s in Chicago with her female lover, Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige, overdoing her sweet-young-thang thing), being driven around by her nephew, Sylvester (Dusan Brown). Rainey and her band have been asked to cut a few sides by a white man named Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), who owns a small race-music record label where Rainey has worked before. While Sturdyvant may know what he has in the great, brazen composer of such blues standards as “See See Rider” and the in-your-face queer…

I love you Harlem Your life your pregnant Women, your relief lines Outside the bank . . . What a treasure of goodness And life shambles . . . Neel moved to Spanish Harlem with José Santiago Negron, a working-class Puerto Rican musician, who fathered her third child, Richard, the following year. (Neel’s first and only husband was the artist Carlos Enríquez Gómez, with whom she had two children: Santillana, born in 1927, who died of diphtheria as an infant, and Isabetta, born in 1928, whom Gómez…

One Hundred Years Of James Joyces Ulysses - The New Yorker

Saar uses prefabricated pieces (Black dolls, Aunt Jemima paraphernalia, advertising images, and the like) to show us how women of color have been repeatedly treated as props—accommodating, beneficent characters—in the never-ending drama of race. These images rarely even hint at an interior life, but Saar makes that interiority manifest. Her seminal work, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972)—which the activist Angela Davis reportedly credited with sparking the Black women’s movement—is a box co…

“Posing Modernity,” with its informative, never didactic wall texts and its wonderful abundance of paintings, photographs, and ephemera, began more or less with Laure, the model who posed as the Black maid for Manet’s astonishing 1863 work “Olympia’’ (though that painting wasn’t in the show), and continued through the twentieth century, to that performing juggernaut Josephine Baker and on to contemporary artists such as Mickalene Thomas, who reinterpreted the Laure figure in her 2012 series, “Un…