Walking through the weeds of a highway shoulder at night. That was okay. She’d check on Valerie and finish off the bit on Joey’s mirror. Whenever cars passed she turned and stuck out her thumb like she was in a movie. She felt ridiculous, but a car pulled over. Milk ran up to it, got in, and came to in the morning in the weeds of another shoulder . . .
Publisher Johnny Temple interviews Edwidge Danticat as part of Akashic Books’ “Literary Lions” interview series!
When I was eight years old, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. The Dallas school district saw I was brown, so they stuck me in ESL classes with the other brown children.
The actual problem was that I was having over a hundred minor seizures per day . . .
Johnny Temple interviews Dr. Brenda M. Greene, professor of English and Executive Director of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York.
We used to sit in my friend Stevie’s tree house and huff nitrous oxide out of a gas cracker we had stolen from Crate & Barrel at the mall. Stevie’s older brother bought the cartridges for us at the local head shop. They were silver and shaped like bullets. They looked the same as the CO2 cartridges we used to operate Stevie’s BB gun, which we also kept in the tree house. The tree house was where we kept everything we held dear that summer . . .