Search All Winners

It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.

NAT TURNER

What do you mean by your copyright?

The right to copy?

THOMAS R. GRAY

Yes, well, the right to publish and distribute, which involves copying necessarily.

NAT

And who can grant such a right?

THOMAS

The copyright office, naturally.

NAT

...

THOMAS

It protects the rights of the man who has done the work.

NAT

And is God not a sufficient witness of our works?

THOMAS

Uh,

No.

I remembered the sweet powerful taste of pop. Tommy Feathers had stopped for coffee when he was hunting wolverine. He tossed a bulged red and white can on the chopping block. “You’ll have tat one springtime,” he joked. He was sober; that meant he was laughing and friendly, not frothing about naluagmius starving his family, stealing food out of his children’s mouths. We had sat around waiting for it to thaw. We could have bought pops in Takunak but according to Abe, pop cost money, wasted aluminum, and was bad for our teeth. Nothing for something. Why not drink water? Now Iris was describing the high school friends and fun we’d always worried we missed out on, and I wondered why I hadn’t bought myself a few Cokes.

This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.

I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.

My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.

Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.

She love rainin on parades.

It happened inside a single room.

For me. Forgive me

If you feel with this assertion I diminish you

Or the integrity of your story.

But it’s true: I was nowhere, there,

On the frayed brown carpet, between two beds—

Mine to the right, my brother’s to the left—

Counting the tiny holes

In the radiator cover, dark eyes

Piercing through painted-white metal.

When I looked around, I saw nothing that I was.

Not even other nothings, like me.

Do you think I take from you?

I do not take from you, I am you.