Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. Happy Easter! As always, there’s an audio of this post if that works better for your life. And just for fun, here’s a link to Ella Fitzgerald singing “A Tisket, A Tasket.”
Easter is a celebration, but it is also a time to reflect on the ways that we are complicit in injustice, to allow ourselves to accept the gifts of grace and mercy and to reflect on how we can create a more just world, where love triumphs over evil and everyone is free.
Because I am traveling and because it is a holiday, I’m keeping this pocket short and sweet and offering three suggestions for books you might want to add to your basket.
1. Never Caught, The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar.
When George Washington became president, he brought his family and his slaves to Philadelphia. Philadelphia had a law which required that slaves be set free after six months. George Washington circumvented this law by sending his slaves back to Mt. Vernon. There are over nine hundred biographies written about George Washington, but there is only one story told about Ona Judge, the woman who risked everything to seek her freedom and who as a result became the subject of an intense manhunt led by Washington.
This past week, I attended the Dream Deferred Conference in New York, and I listened to Erica Armstrong Dunbar speak about her work as a historian, the books she has written, and her role as co-executive producer of The Gilded Age. (Yes, she is a total bad ass, and if you haven’t watched The Gilded Age, consider this two recommendations in one.) She talked about how she sometimes wonders if she has the courage to muster through our current world. Then, she remembers what black women, like Ona Judge and her own ancestors had to endure, how they managed in the face of abuse and oppression to carve out lives of meaning, purpose and joy. She finds strength in their stories.
2. Congratulations, The Best is Over by R. Eric Thomas
This book includes personal essays about Eric’s life after he married his husband David. It is beautiful, heart-warming and laugh out loud funny. In it, Eric and David return to Baltimore, the city Eric never thought he would return to. Here’s an excerpt.
Moving away had given me the chance to write another narrative, but it had also calcified my complicated feelings about my hometown into an active grudge. Callously, I used to quip, “I don’t want to move back to Baltimore even to be buried.” And while it feels silly to have a feud with a city for what are, largely, personal problems, quirks of temperament, and crises I created on my own with the help of structural oppression, I did frequently write emails to the mayor of Baltimore with the subject line “APOLOGIZE!”
It is delightful, and it has the best cover and you should probably stop reading this, and go read it now.
3. And finally, The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón
Here you can find this poem among many others.
Give Me This
by Ada Limón
I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.
Speaking of short and sweet, here is me with my niece and nephew this past week.
I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. Please do share your own eggs of interest. What resonates with you? What books are in your basket? What brings you “small spasms of joy?”
Thank you for the book recs. I have read the one by R. Eric Thomas and loved it. I always feel that I need time at a quiet beach or poolside to read poetry, but I am gonna give it a try. It is my spring break, and I have only three goals: Rest, read and write. Repeat. So far I have slept ten hours a night, finished a cool new fantasy book recommended by my daughter and restarted my morning pages.
Words pondering justice are always needed. And there isn't a day that goes by that I don't need another way to think of hope. Happy Easter.