With Sighs Too Deep for Words

  If you white,  yo u alright If you yellow,  y ou mellow If you brown,  s tick around If you black,  s tep back   We were Negroes and I was in the first grade when our teacher for some inexplicable reason asked us to line up by skin color. Thinking generously, one might think she was just trying out a new method for lining up so the same beginning and end of the alphabet weren’t in the front and the back. Thinking otherwise, one could imagine all manner of reasons as I have over the more than six decades since then.    Still it’s inexplicable because this was in segregated Mississippi, meaning all the students were Negroes as was our teacher. But I no longer think the why is really important as I look back.   I see my six-year-old self place myself in line among my darker chocolate friends near the end of the line. My friends laugh and my teacher tells me to stop fooling around. When I look at her with my face wrinkled in confusion, she grab...

Refraction is the bending of light when it goes from one medium to another so, when a ray of light passes through a glass prism, refraction of light occurs both, when it enters the prism as well as when it leaves the prism. Since the refracting surfaces are not parallel, therefore, the emergent ray and incident ray are not parallel to one another. In this case the ray of light is deviated on passing through the prism.     Even though I loved my mother, I did not like her. She was uncomfortable and unsettling to me whenever I was in her presence. Her language was crude and southern country. A speech impediment further diminished her articulation. She wore too-small clothing that shouted, “Buy me!” She preferred cheap fur coats over wool or down, and even cheaper wigs over her own hair. She was the original hoochie mama in my life. I loved her for all of this. She drove obscenely huge cars in flashy colors as if she had a small penis to compensate for. We knew she’d bribed ...