Featured Writing

Long Beach Police Department Officer Miguel Rosales, badge number 5747, pulls up to the curb on his motorcycle and says, “Let me talk to you for a second.” He speaks as if we are acquaintances…

My grandmother will tell you that she does not like white people, does not look them in the eye.

W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness in…

Raffy’s was the bodega directly across the street from our Brooklyn apartment, and up through high school, I was certain that it had everything I could ever need in life…

Works in Progress…

The Impossible People by J.L. Roberts is an ethnographic memoir that explores how the place and culture of late twentieth century NYC shaped one child’s view and understanding of the world. This narrative examines the external societal influences that cause us to internalize ideas about race, class, and culture, and how those beliefs serve us as we endeavor to pursue “The American Dream.” Borrowing on scientific theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, a neurodivergent Black child attempts to ground her existence in space and time, even as encounters with prejudice and discrimination threaten her understanding of the rules governing place and participation. This book asks the questions “What is time? What is space and reality for the Black people traveling across multiple dimensions, under and over and through endless veils and doors and roadblocks in search of home? In search of belonging?”

The Last Blow From The Impossible People (TW: Domestic Violence)

Hit, verb: to bring one’s hand or a tool or weapon into contact with (someone or something) quickly and forcefully; to accidentally strike (part of one’s body) against something; (of a moving object or body) to come into contact with (someone or something stationary) quickly and forcefully; to touch or press (part of a machine or other device) in order to work it; (or a missile or a person aiming one) to strike (a target); to be suddenly and vividly realized by; to cause harm or distress to; to reach (a particular level, point, or figure).

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The only thing the family ever says about the last time my mother hit me is that Auntie called herself making a cherry pie that year. She bought cherry pie filling in a can and frozen pie crust, and everybody sat satisfied and laughing through stiff full bellies at the loveless pie that she had not remembered to press with a fork at its edges. There were still teases ready on tongues when I came tumbling down the stairs and crawled under the Thanksgiving table. My mother followed, hot-faced and stern, with the thunder of three hundred and forty years of disrespect in her throat.

Before my grandmother could finish asking me what on earth I was doing, mommy pounded the top of the table. “Get out! Get your ass out here right fucking now!” She was hoarse with rage. My father rose from his chair, luckily not yet halfway through his first strawberry daiquiri, and approached my mother. “No, no! Don’t touch me, Myron. Jasmin get out here!” She was wheezing now, breathing as deep into her chest as she could, fighting back tears. “She hit me. She hit me in the face. I said get out here!” She slapped the top of the oak table again, and my father got between her and the solid wood and backed her up carefully, like a matador coaxing an unbroken bull. “You hit me first!” I said, making sure to scoot all the way to the center, behind the drop leaf, where her legs and arms could not reach me. She darted around my father and stalked to the other side of the oval table, and I tracked the other way. We did this a few times, as the game of telephone circulated around the room.

“She hit her?”  “Mmhm. She said Jazz hit her in the face.” “Oooh-oooh!” This is the sound my grandmother makes when she is at a loss for words over someone’s actions or some other unbelievable phenomenon—a high C-sharp followed by the lower A-natural—with the the first “Oooh,” lasting two beats, and the second, only one. When someone’s niece has another baby on the way and she already struggles to care for the ones she has; when the weather forecast predicts ten feet of snow; when a woman at church steps in wearing a blasphemously ugly outfit “for God.”

Justin was playing telephone with the cousins upstairs. He had heard the slap. Not the first one—not the clumsy slap-thud of my cheek and the front of my body smacking the wall at the top of the stairs—my slap; the one I cut across my mother’s face after I asked her why she had pushed me into the wall, and she responded, “Because I fucking felt like it!” 

“Well I fucking feel like doing this!” I said, and I wound up and hit her hard on the right side of her face. I was shocked at how well my unpracticed hand met her flesh, surprised by my own aggression, the sound it made. I followed up my physical retaliation with a verbal one “And if you ever hit me again, I will kill you.” This second attack felt more like my own. It was like many an attack I had mounted over the years; volatile and precise, spoken calmly, so that the person receiving my words knew that I meant them. I never told people that they were stupid or gross; they were ignorant and disgusting. There were no watered down yo mama jokes or clowns on people’s clothing. I studied people in order to understand them, and when they caused me pain, my defenses honed in on an insecurity of theirs that I had intimated from a facial expression or the drawing back of a shoulder, the folding of arms, and I made them believe that their fears had been realized. I had no understanding of the harm I was causing until much later, and then the shame of having once again responded to a nerf ball with cannon caused me to retreat for days or weeks. I wanted to be close to people. I wanted to understand the games they played and play too. And so often I got it very wrong. 

I had all but given up on knowing my mother, though. The doors were locked from the inside, and even when she left one slightly ajar, she could not be trusted with the tips of anyone’s fingers. I needed the hitting to stop. And I had induced that the thing my mother feared most in the world was that she was not a good mother, that something her children did would reflect poorly upon her as a parent and she’d be found out. I’d like to say that the slap was thought out and measured. It was not. I had simply tried everything else I could think of and I was fed up with being a vessel for the pain she could not communicate to others or admit to herself. Once I saw her face, though, the shrinking and the shame, once I realized that she was not ashamed of me but herself, that is when I decided to threaten her life. 

Justin, who had paused the video game to eavesdrop once he heard the rise in my voice, popped his head out of the back bedroom to find me staring  back at him with wide-eyed disbelief. From behind her, he could see that mommy was clutching her cheek, nearly ablaze with anger. I don’t think she took a single breath after that, not until Justin switched on the hallway light and mumbled “Oh my god. Jasmin hit mommy. Jasmin HIT MOMMY!” He was speaking about me in the third person, as though I were already past tense. His words transported us both into the reality of what I had just done. He looked at me as if it might be the last time and screamed “RUN!” 

I turned and started down the carpeted stairs, sliding and tripping a little in my bare feet, and when I landed on all fours at the bottom, the safety of the table was at eye level. I scurried in between grandma and daddy, who were only half tucked in themselves, and I curled into a seated cannonball, looking around hypervigilantly at my godmother’s and uncle’s feet. Auntie sat across the room on the couch, and aunt Diedra was across from her on the mirroring couch, with her back to the table. Justin, having fulfilled the duty of delivering the news of my grand assault, ran down the stairs to get among the aftermath. Mommy was grabbing at me now, and daddy was hold her back, repeating “Chequetta, Chequetta, calm down! I’ll deal with it. Just calm down!” She was fighting him, telling him not to tell her to calm down, yelling accusations about how I must think I am—You think you Grown? You think you Big? You think you Something?!

“You gettin’ the hell out of my house! That’s whatchu are. Get out! Right now—get out!” 

The rhetorical blows strained and coughed their way out of her windpipe; there was no time for a sip of water in the defense of her maternal dignity, no breath deep enough to squelch the fire in her chest. I knew exactly what she was feeling, my mother. I knew it as my tongue knows the roof of my own mouth. There are cells in my body that have recorded every beating, every “spanking” and punch and slap and flick and pop and pluck, every “Be quiet! and “Stupid!” and “Shut up before I give you something to cry for!” The thwack of a belt will always sound like a demand for the end of my conscious life. And the inherited violence of a life of subjugation can only be mined from the breastbone and put out one hot coal at a time. She had bequeathed me this same wound and the same rage that wafts from within it. I knew that someday I would have to dig and dig to discover myself underneath it.

Daddy had managed to back mommy into the corner of the kitchen, by the sink. “Jasmin, go upstairs and wait in your room. Lock the door.” He gave this instruction without taking his eyes off of my mother. I skulked toward the edge of the table and peaked out from my hiding place, and Justin ducked his head down and said “She’s in the kitchen; hurry up!” I banged my already hurt knee on a support post as I climbed over it, and mommy screamed “You’re getting the hell out of this house! I’m sending you away! To boarding school!” I rushed into the darkness of the staircase and up to my room. I turned the knob lock and reinforced the hold with a shoe that I shoved up under the bottom of the door. I lied on my bed and shut my eyes. I felt the calm of distance and the promise of freedom. 

The light of the half moon painted the room with a faded midnight blue that eased me so smoothly into travel that I did not smell the highway air until Curtis pulled over to the side of the road to get a drink from the trunk. My mother’s legs had stopped itching now. The heat had relented when the sun went down, and the smooth ride of Curtis’ (car type) closed her eyes on her behalf. I could feel the relief and excitement—her excitement—at being free from the oppression of the buttoned-up city, and free from Earnestine.