I’ve had Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me on my reading pile for an embarrassingly long time. I was incredibly intimidated by it because I already had an inkling of the pain that is inherent in a Black man’s existence, and I didn’t know if I could handle reading a whole book about it. It’s still sitting on my pile, waiting for that time.

Then, I discovered Coates had just come out with a work of fiction. I felt like that was a format I could handle.

I started listening to Americanah on the commute to Sewing Camp. Written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and clocking in at just under 17 and a half hours, I figured I’d speed it up to 1.25 like I usually do for my audio books and cut the listening time down a bit.

That lasted for less than a few paragraphs of the first chapter.

When I was in college, I took an American Lit class with a new teacher. He had been hired upon the retirement of a beloved professor and I disliked him simply because he wasn’t his predecessor.

The only thing I remember from the class was the day our professor asked a white student to read a passage from a Flannery O’Connor book that contained the N-word. The room was tense, and a Black student in the back of the room (the only one?) walked out when our fellow student said the word.

We also had a Toni Morrison book assigned that semester.