I went to Brunswick, GA to write long about Ahmaud Arbery. I talked to his aunts, wrote about the very American deaths that come from racism and a pandemic, Baldwin, Freedom Summer, my dad and a Black boy walking into an empty house with dreams. https://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/ahmaud-arbery-will-not-be-erased/

"Black people disappear in America. This fact is woven into the fabric of our country. Parents are separated from their children at slave auctions... A loved one is here one day and turns up in the...woods the next, dangling from trees under the cover of nightfall and inhumanity.

there's a paragraph in there about bodies being erased as time passes since they've been killed, and I listed killings since Arbery. I wrote that paragraph the day before George Floyd was killed. I can't explain the depression of constantly updating that paragraph.

but this is about what families and towns and Black people do to make sure names are remembered and that Black bodies don't stay hidden. This is about a mother and aunts and reverends and activists keeping names and their children alive.

I'm in tears.