The titular story, “Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apologies,” pans around the moment when two unarmed black men are killed by police on the sidewalk outside of a cosplay convention in Los Angeles. Thompson-Spires writes that while abolitionists like Smith “were trying to theorize what it would mean for black people to have the full rights of citizenship, the black people in have, on paper, full rights under the law.” Her stories, she continues, “maintain an interest in black US citizenship, the black middle class, and the future of black American life during pivotal socio-political moments.” Thompson-Spires notes, though, that the stories in her collection don’t follow the same structure as Smith’s sketches, and that the lives of the characters in Smith’s work differ markedly from those of the characters in her stories in their rights and conditions under the law. ![]() A leading intellectual, abolitionist and colleague of Douglass, Smith wrote his sketches in order to humanize black Americans in the public consciousness at a time when phrenology was all the rage and served as the pseudoscientific foundation on which white supremacists built their rationalizations for a race-based caste system. ![]() Smith’s sketches depicted a range of black American laborers, washerwomen, gravediggers, and other diverse and sundry folk. Thompson-Spires, who holds a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois, states in the collection’s afterword that the inspiration for the title and, to some degree, the subject matter, was a series of literary sketches written in the 1850s by James McCune Smith and published in Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Heads of the Colored People captures black lives in this current, divided, Facebook-Live-Black-Lives-Matter-#MeToo moment, and catalogues trauma’s impacts on black bodies, minds and souls, female and male, adult and child alike, as perpetrated against us, by us and between us in stunningly myriad forms: systemic racism and unconscious bias, police brutality, double consciousness, body consciousness, self-hatred, and more. ![]() ![]() In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” The heart of this collection of twelve stories, the thing that Thompson-Spires communicates with great verve, humor, and empathy, is the answer to that question-a booming “Yes!”-especially as experienced by black Americans. Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |