Margaret Burnham

“In this book, equal parts a memoir, a biography of his legendary father, and an indictment, Omowale Moses deftly knits together distinct landscapes, multiple generations, and disparate classrooms to reprise and then converse with the codes and significations of an early twenty-first-century Black man. Amidst the prophecies of his great-grandfather about white perils, the testimonies of his father about Mississippi’s lethality, and the warmth and wrath of his mother sits Omo’s elegant meditation on his childhood in Tanzania, adolescence in Massachusetts, and young manhood in Mississippi. Adopting yet adapting his parents’ legacy of a life in Black struggle, Omo leads his readers to ponder how blood shapes destiny, how geography burdens memory. Moving seamlessly from the basketball courts he once ruled in Cambridge to the Delta schools he taught in, Omowale Moses writes with humor, hope, and painstaking honesty, rendering visible lines of descent, authority, and obligation by meandering dynamically back and forth across time, place, and purpose. A tender exploration of the spirit and flesh of one Black man and his forebears, the book is both a sweeping indictment of an old problem and an expansive call to action.”

—Margaret Burnham, author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners