She had dark brown skin, supercool red-framed glasses, and an Afro puff on each side of her head. She reminded Cornell of Amaya. Her jean jacket had a bunch of buttons pinned to the collar and pockets. Cornell leaned forward, trying to read some—BLACK LIVES MATTER; LOVE IS LOVE —when Carter reminded them he was in the room.
This story with the majestically long-winded title is the opening story in the collection (following Part One of a three-part story spread across the volume by Kwame Mbalia) and this quote cements its place in history. The book was published in the summer of 2021, a year after the cities across America exploded in a riotous outrage against the systemic racism in law enforcement finally made impossible to ignore with the murder in plain sight of George Floyd. In that incendiary summer the phrase “Black Lives Matter” became a global statement asserting the simple right to be black in America without it being a crime. It was that summer before white supremacists managed to turn this simple cry for equality into a sinister terrorist threat for millions of easily-led and highly gullible Americans that was the motivation for this collection. One might therefore quickly assume that this phrase pops up frequently over the course of the stories of the collection. The evidence therein proves that one should only rarely quickly make assumptions about anything in life.
“Joy is a fragile thing, my boy, and must be treated as such. Too harsh and it disintegrates. Rush, and it disappears. So we coax it forth. Feed it, like kindling to a fire.”
“The Griot of Grover Street” features two parts which separates the stories in the book before concluding with a third part all on its own. Unlike the phrase “Black Lives Matter” the word “joy” appears quite often in one form or another, whether by itself or as part of “joyful” or even “enjoy.” The concept of joy is the driving force of the collection as much as the reality of being a young black boy. Although not the first instance or even among the very first couple of uses, it is in this quote that joy is singled out as something with a visceral tangibility that may not be easily found, but can very easily be lost or taken.
Why don’t you write a poem
about someone special using important facts
you know about them?
These might include their favorite color,
their smell, an object you associate with them,
and anything else you think is important
from your memory or research.
Although the bulk of this collection is comprised of short stories that span across various genres, it is not entirely limited to prose. Dean Atta’s contribution is a set of poems telling a narrative connected by the recurrence of certain characters. The entire cycle of poems bears the title Extinct, but each individual poem has its own title. The first poem is called “Today.” The next poem is titled “Yesterday” and is a first-person narrative by a young speaker named Dylan whom everyone in his family calls “Dilly” that details to the Natural History Museum. This poem is followed by another titled “Today” and the cycle concludes with a poem titled “Tonight” which are also connected to the visit to the museum. Except that the cycle doesn’t actually end with “Tonight.” There is one more poem yet to go and it is one that steps out of the narrative proper to become a non-fictional appendix of sorts in which Atta encourages those who find joy in reading to find joy in writing.
