Stories
My home — a little 1920s bungalow in South Los Angeles off Slauson Avenue — is for sale. In the mornings, I check my email and Zillow reminds me that something I cherish is being offered up to strangers.
Dread gathers in my stomach. I’m not ready to leave. But two months ago, after ongoing talks with my husband Marcus, a real estate agent — It’s a seller’s market right now. Housing prices are at an all-time high, but experts are predicting another housing crash is just around the corner — I agreed to let him list our house to “test the market.”
White Oak
ScreamOnline.com
Burt Bridges is tallying up his first customer of the morning when the sheriff and two other men walk into his store, shotguns at their sides.
Heart of a Tree
TheFigWritersStudio.com
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” -Romans 8:22.
An oak tree in Holmesville, Mississippi groaned all night after hatred used it to destroy, to kill, to lynch Burt Bridges.
Mardi Gras in Los Angeles
L.A. Parent
Much of my small-town Louisiana childhood was spent taking French classes at school, shelling field peas on Grandmama’s front porch, scaling perch that Uncle Herbert brought over by the bucketfuls, and daydreaming about one day moving to New Orleans, which sat like a dream a few hours east of my hometown.
Familiar Fruit
Ms. Aligned, Women Writing About Men
My family ended up in Louisiana in the early 1900s, after fleeing the lynching trees of Mississippi.
The Seeker and The Artist
TheManifestStation.net
It was 1984, and parachute pants and Jordache jeans were all the rage at DeRidder Junior High School. My Seventeen magazine-reading peers poked fun at my daily attire: dresses that hung loosely on my thin frame before flaring at the hems to reveal my knock-knees.
When Cassandra looked at her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, she saw the burden of childbirth. For herself, she wanted more.
I had the pleasure of animating one of six pieces for The New York Times' Conception Series.
Art Director/ Producer - Margaret Williams, Producer - Gayatri Kaul, Director - Amelia Giller, Assistant Animator - Eli Guillou, Additional Animation - Rasmus Bak, & Music by Pierre O’Reilly.
Variations: The Jazz Artist
EntropyMag.org
For Harold Battiste, Jr.
In New Orleans, I saw a reflection of myself in a stranger’s marbled tombstone. I turned away, but in every direction, rows and rows of graves stood tall: bright reminders.
(Image Source: ‘Congo Square’ by Adéwálé Adénlé)
Children Question The Bully’s Right To The Presidential Seat
RaisingMothers.com
I was in 6th grade, that era of awkward limbs and suffocating self-consciousness, when a strange man told me I could not see.
“Young lady,” he said, “I don’t see how you’ve been walking around here all this time without running into stuff.”
To Alton Sterling’s Son
RaisingMothers.com
On the heels of your father’s murder, you stood at a press conference with your mother, your arm draped around her shoulders. You stood there for a brave moment—you, in your school-boy striped polo shirt, left to be the man of the house in the wake of your daddy’s fresh death.
Cover design by Krystal Quiles
The Feminist Press, TAYO Literary Magazine, and distinguished judges Jennifer Baker, Regina Brooks, YZ Chin, Bridgett M. Davis, Juli Delgado Lopera, Brontez Purnell, KaeLyn Rich, Melissa R. Sipin, and Jamia Wilson are honored to award the 2020 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize to Cassandra Lane for her book, We Are Bridges.
Lane’s memoir weaves the story of her great-grandfather’s lynching with her experience of becoming a mother, attempting to unearth the lives of her ancestors and provide her child with a family record. The book will be published by The Feminist Press in the summer of 2021.
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