Summary

Brittany recalled a memory from when she was a child of her mother combing her hair in Fulbright, Texas, while her younger sister Jazz danced around the television. After her mother, who she called Mama, finished combing her hair, they ate plums from her Aunt Opal’s tree across the road.

Brittany described her mother as a strikingly beautiful Black woman with Filipina and half-Cherokee grandmothers. From a young age, she had a sharp wit and fiery personality. She grew up with her mother in the small, rural town of Greenville, Texas. A sign outside Greenville read “The Blackest Land and the Whitest People,” which Brittany’s family knew was a reference to racism, although some claimed that ‘whitest’ referred to moral purity. Although Brittany’s mother was rebellious as a teenager, she was also driven – she enrolled in a basic training...