ROLLING IN THE DEEP

Rolling In The Deep is a book about love and its various manifestations: romantic, enduring, unconditional, familial, friendship, and self-love, which are woven throughout the book. What is required of love? That was the question that Dinah asked on the third night of the Rodney King riots in 1992. Action was her answer and response. While Ambrose, in contrast, would decide that night that the cost of loving Dinah was, Too damn high.

Delray and his wife Dinah migrated from Louisiana like many other Southern African Americans in the 1960s, looking for a place where they could stand up straight and pursue a dream they thought was promised to all. Although the promised land didn’t afford them the luxury of dreams, they found a special place in Los Angeles called the Florence-Graham or Florence-Firestone area. Later, it would be lumped into the general geography of South Central Los Angeles and often erroneously referred to as Watts. Within its 3.580 square miles, the story of Dinah, Ambrose, Indigo, and Onyx unfolds. Miss Lottie and her dog Roscoe come along for the ride. The story touches on how the neighborhood’s changing demographics and shared history affect the place they call home. The book begins in 2010 with two devastating events happening on the same day. Indigo is sexually assaulted by her live-in boyfriend on the very day that her grandmother, Dinah, dies. These events begin the unraveling of love, trust, and a long-buried secret. When Indigo moved back to the old neighborhood and the home that her grandmother raised her in, strange things began to happen. She questions her role in the assault, her judgment, and her friendships, all while grieving and wondering if there’s something evil in the house.

Ambrose was the group's sole survivor who came to Los Angeles in the 1960s. His wife Lucinda, his friend Delray, and now Dinah are all dead. Dinah, a woman he had loved longer than he had been married to his wife has just died. Her death made the promise he made in 1992 to keep her secret even more troubling. So, Ambrose solicits the help of his grandson Onyx to determine what Dinah’s granddaughter intends to do with her house. As Onyx and Indigo become reacquainted, he keeps his grandfather apprised of her movements in hopes that no further action will be necessary. But when Indigo’s dreams feel more like memories, and she is not the only one feeling a malevolent presence, Ambrose can no longer keep Dinah’s secret. Indigo grapples with who she is and who her mother and grandmother were after adjusting the lens through which she saw them and herself. In the end, she asks herself what she wouldn’t do for love and is shaken by her answer.

Rolling In The Deep is finally in the publisher's hands. I'm excited to have this book available to the public and, hopefully, in your hands soon! Thank you for supporting an independent African American author.

THE SELLING OF OUR SOULS: MY TAKE ON DIDDY AND HIP-HOP

They say opinions are like a-holes; everybody has one. So, here’s mine. I don’t celebrate anyone's downfall. I’m old enough to remember when hip-hop came onto the music scene. A nephew of mine was very excited about it, but I didn’t get it because those guys weren’t singing. They were talking. It wasn’t until I began to really listen to what they were saying that I understood the enormity of hip-hop. Young African American men had innately tapped into what their souls had been created to do. They were doing what their ancestors before them perhaps would have done if it had not been for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These modern-day griots were telling the stories of their villages on vinyl in lyrical poetry form. That is, until they sold their souls for a record contract. Looking back at the early days of hip-hop, especially when it was still underground and spoke of social injustice, hip-hop was a cultural expression of what it meant to be Black in America. However, the thing that they call hip-hop today is not,” The Culture” as the Recording Industry, BET, or Essence would have you believe. Hip-hop, like everything good and beautiful that African Americans have created from their shared experiences has been stolen and broken into distorted pieces. Instead of spotlighting inequities and calling for social justice in this country, rappers put out diss tracks verbally attacking each other. But even before the personal diss tracks got to the present-day level, we had the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that, I’m sure, led to the unnecessary deaths of an unknown number of young people caught in the crosshair of gang rivalry hyped up by a lyric of a song. The commercialization of this art form, which was effectively the selling of the artist's soul when the artist chose to say the Black women were big booty bitches and hoes; and Black men were drug dealing, pimps, and players who couldn’t commit to anything or anyone was when hip-hop was no longer, “The Culture.”

We have got to stop selling ourselves. We don’t need to denigrate our women, our men, or ourselves to sell a record. Female artists, keep your clothes on when you go onstage, and let your voices and the lyrics move your audience. Male artists, we don’t need you to tear down another Black man or lie about your drug or gang-banging background. Just tell us what you have learned in your life’s journey, how you came to be a man in this foreign land, and how you love without too much detail.

If this Diddy thing is true, he was not alone in it. He was not allowed to operate for years without people in the record industry knowing what was going on. I say, let him and anyone else who participated or allowed him and others to rape children and other adults be revealed and punished. Let the industry burn down to the ground, and then maybe Hip-Hop can start over again and become what it was meant to be.

BLACK, PERSON OF COLOR, OR TIME TO REBRAND?

Historically, a person was considered to be Black if they had one drop of Black blood. The one-drop rule was used during slavery in America to assign the children of mixed ethnic groups to the status of enslaved people and to promote the ideology of White supremacy. This also created a caste system based on the color of one's skin. You were legally White if you were a Free Person of Color before the Civil War and had less than one-eighth of Black blood. Many Free People of Color cloaked themselves in the safety of whiteness during that period in America’s history.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and we have a Woman of Color, running to be the President of the United States of America. If anyone questions her Blackness, they are immediately looked upon as someone who swallowed the Kool-Aid that the orange man gave them. Little did Trump know when he asked, “When did Kamala become Black?” that he would spark a thoughtful response. I asked myself, “If her mother is Indian from India, and her father is from Jamaica, where were her Black Aunties and Big Mommas?” What I was really saying with that question was Kamala Harris’s experience in America was not the experience of African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved on southern plantations for hundreds of years. Her experience was that of a second-generation immigrant. Her parents came to America willingly to seek a better life. My parents and their parents and their parents…knew that the American Dream and the inscriptions on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” was not referring to them.

I will cast my vote for Kamala Harris because she is far better than the orange alternative, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for her to right America's wrongs. I will, however, hope that she remembers the warm embraces of those Black Aunties and Big Mommas who took care of her until her mother could pick her up from daycare at the end of the day.

I am more than a Person of Color, and the Black woman descriptor is too general. Apparently, it is advantageous in certain circumstances for some to call themselves a Black person in America when, in fact, they are people of color with a distinct cultural and ethnic heritage that is vastly different from descendants of the enslaved. Instead of passing for White, some people are now passing for Black. That is until being Black becomes a little too real, pedestrian, or no longer serves a purpose.

So, Black people whose roots run deep in the blood-soaked soil of former plantations, what should we call ourselves now? What we call ourselves should separate us from color and identify us as descendants of the people who built this country and its incredible wealth. Our history, unique struggle, and redress in this country can’t be consumed in the pan-ethnic moniker “People of Color, of Black.”