California, 1989
Rubidoux and Riverside, California, 1997 (South Carolina, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia)
Riverside, California, Endless
Riverside, California (Tulsa, Oklahoma; Fraser, Colorado)
29 Al Green—Driveway #1, The Second Love Letter
30 Travels with My Ex in the Time of Revenue
Orange County, California, 2009
31 Switzerland, Loveland, Cuddyland
Always, January 12, 1950, Always
32 Bring Me Your Smartest Girl
Riverside, California, 2008; Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1925
Los Angeles, California, 2009 (Tulsa, Oklahoma; Riverside, California)
34 A Place of Style and Refuge—White House #2
Riverside, California, December 2011
35 Letter to My Nephew—Our Dungeon Shook (After James Baldwin)
36 American Human Not Interested
Riverside and Santa Barbara, California; Ibadan, Nigeria, 2018
40 The Work of Women—Evaporation and Memory, White House #3
To my daughters:
They never tell us about the odysseys of women. They never say about a woman: “Her passage was worthy of Homer . . . her voyage a mythic quest for new lands.” Women don’t get the Heroine’s Journey.
Men are accorded the road and the sea and the asphalt. The monsters and battles and the murders. Men get The Iliad and The Odyssey. They get Joseph Campbell. They get The Thousand Faces of the Hero. They get “the epic novel,” “the great American story,” and Ken Burns documentaries.
But our women fought harder than men—they fought men! Men who claimed to love them, to protect them, to help them—men who trapped and tried to kill them. They fought for sons and daughters, they had the battalions of their sisters and mothers and aunts. Some bad-ass aunts. The women used their cunning and their bullets, the power of their ancestors and of the other women in the wagon or the truck with them. They survived passages that would