Tressie McMillan Cottom

And there were only maybe a dozen or so tables pressed up against a long wall on the empty side of the room. The other wall had the bar, wrapped in tufted pleather and papered with liquor ads featuring smiling, glorious black people living the high life

bodies pressed by you

I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine.

Thick where I should have been thin, more when I should have been less, a high school teacher nicknamed me “Ms. Personality,” and it did not feel like a superlative

long in the tooth

My people were escaping poor white trash who made it hard to pay taxes to keep the bits of worthless land that meant the world to us to own.11 We were escaping black men who drank too much and sometimes touched little girls too long in ways that were both wrong and acceptable. We were escaping a racial hierarchy where “injuns” could pass as biracial blacks in the shadows of Native lands that had been stolen but then cohabitated in ways that made determining who was black and who was red a game with high stakes for survival.