“I’m not talking about being beat up on, but living my life in a certain way. For a long time I didn’t care enough about myself to fight for the way I wanted to live. So I let myself get fucked over by men I didn’t even care about. It’s taken me a while to come out of that, but now I’m at the point where I’m not going to use myself up anymore with men I don’t care enough about to fight with. I like you, Melvin, but we won’t get along if you don’t fight or try to stop me from fighting.”

We didn’t say any more. There was only the hush of our bodies laboring slowly, slightly apart. Everything that had happened over the last week had taken a lot out of me, and listening to Alice gave me the jitters. She was definitely up to something more than a little light sport. But I figured I had done enough fighting for a while and didn’t know if I had the energy to get conjugated with her. A part of me wanted to renege on everything and just lay dead. Hadn’t I earned that right? I had paid my dues. Yet what I would trade off by basking in the non-use of myself could be even worse, since a thing never meant a thing until it moved.

I pulled Alice’s full spoon-shape closer to me.

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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I would like to express my gratitude to Erica Vital-Lazare for her enthusiastic championing of Tragic Magic as part of the inauguration of McSweeney’s OF THE DIASPORA; to Amanda Uhle for her unstinting efforts, shepherding the novel to publication; to Frank Johnson for all he’s done to introduce Tragic Magic to a new generation of readers; and to Ismail Muhammad for his generous foreword, which enlightened me with its engagingly fresh perspective.

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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WESLEY BROWN is an acclaimed novelist, playwright, and teacher. He worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1965 and became a member of the Black Panther Party in 1968. In 1972, he was sentenced to three years in prison for refusing induction into the armed services and spent 18 months in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. For 26 years, Brown was a much-revered professor at Rutgers University, where he inspired hundreds of students. He currently teaches literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and lives in Chatham, New York.

OF THE DIASPORA
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A BOOK SERIES FROM McSWEENEY’S

OF THE DIASPORA is a series of previously published works in Black literature whose themes, settings, characterizations, and conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery, and power born of the Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past. The first novel in the series is Tragic Magic by Wesley Brown, originally published in 1978 and championed by Toni Morrison during her tenure as an editor at Random House. It’s followed by Praisesong for the Widow, a novel by Paule Marshall originally published in 1983 and a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. The third book is a collection of editorial photography by Lester Sloan framed within a conversation with his daughter, Aisha Sabatini Sloan.