I would also like to thank the Alice Bernice Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University, where I workshopped the first half of Conception, and the University of Chicago Creative Writing Center, in whose Emerging Writers Series I read from the book for the first time. I must express gratitude to the following writers for their advice and support of my work and young career: Sapphire, Achy Obejas, Bayo Ojikutu, Harriette Cole, Terrie Williams, bell hooks, Sonia Sanchez, Kenji Jasper, Bernice McFadden, E. Lynn Harris, Terry McMillan, Sofia Quintero, Pittershawn Palmer, and especially Professor Dorothy Roberts, whose book on Black female eugenics, Killing the Black Body, proved to be an invaluable inspiration. Thank you to the following members of Achy Obejas’s writers’ group: David Driscoll, Patrick Reichard, Elise Johnson, and Sarah Frank.

And finally the St. Martin’s team, and all of the reviewers, reporters, readers, bookstore professionals, publications, libraries, teachers, colleges, high schools, and youth organizations who made my first novel, Upstate, such a blessed success.

PART ONE

FROM THE INSIDE looking out, life doesn’t appear rose-colored when you know most people—including yourself—may one day die just like a rose: dried out by trouble and time, fragile and shriveled, scent faded to odor, color bled away, shrunken parts vulnerable to each and every touch, head bowed and apologetic in demise. Now I know better than to mourn when my life ends before it begins. How much more graceful to be cut from a bush and turned upside down immediately after bloom, preserved for a near eternity before a crumbling explosion of blossoms too ashlike to ever be put back together again. I’m content to remain like a flower seed, tumbling in and around and throughout the earth, languishing in possibility and potential because birth always brings the consequences of confusion, sadness, disappointment, then death.

But I could be a Black child soon. One day. Maybe. I haven’t been born yet, but I want to be. I want to live in the world: clothed, fed, loved, guided, educated, magnificent, important, essential, and good. I want to contribute, do something important that might make the world go round just a little bit easier, change a few other lives when I finally get to live my own. But I must be born first. I’ve had chances, but I never made it.