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Healing is not a wish.The woman in Edwin Lester's "If Only: The Hem of His Garment" understood something most of us miss...
08/23/2026

Healing is not a wish.

The woman in Edwin Lester's "If Only: The Hem of His Garment" understood something most of us miss. She did not stand at a distance and hope. She did not whisper a prayer and wait. She closed the gap. She made contact. And in that single moment of holy connection, power moved.

"And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?" (Mark 5:30, KJV)

Read that again. Virtue, power, healing energy, left the body of Christ and entered hers.

Jesus felt it leave Him. This was not symbolic. This was not a metaphor. Something real was exchanged the moment her fingers brushed that fabric. Twelve years of suffering met one second of contact, and contact won.

This is the truth Lester paints with such reverence. Look at the woman's hand. Look at the certainty in her grip. She is not tentatively reaching. She is taking hold of what she came for. Her body is low, but her faith is vertical, climbing toward the only One who could restore what disease had stolen.

The lesson the church too often softens is this: Jesus does not heal from a distance when you refuse to draw near. Embrace requires movement. It requires risk. It requires you to push past the crowd of doubts, the crowd of past disappointments, the crowd of voices saying you have already tried everything.

Healing flows to those who close the distance.
She had bled for twelve years. Twelve years of being declared unclean. Twelve years of being told to stay back. And in one afternoon, one decision, one outstretched arm, all of it was reversed. Not because she prayed harder than anyone else. Because she touched Him.

What are you keeping at arm's length today? What healing are you hoping for from a safe distance? The hem is still within reach. But you have to close the gap.

The little white church sits back on the bank with its steeple catching the light, and its reflection lies quiet on the ...
07/27/2026

The little white church sits back on the bank with its steeple catching the light, and its reflection lies quiet on the water below. Above it, a long wooden trestle bridge carries the whole congregation out over the creek. Below, in the shallows, the minister stands, waiting with the candidates in white robes and white headwraps.

It is baptism Sunday. Ted Ellis paints parasols raised against the sun. He puts children on the bank and flowers blooming along the water's edge. The eye travels the way the day itself traveled, from the sanctuary on the hill to the bridge to the water where the work of the morning was done. The greens are deep and layered, the water holds every reflection, and the whole composition carries the hush that falls over a crowd right before somebody goes under.

"Take Me to the Water" is one of the few African American spirituals written directly about baptism itself. Its verses are plain and repeated: "Take me to the water to be baptized; none but the righteous shall see God." The text first appeared in print in a 1982 Church of God in Christ hymnal, though recordings and references in the narratives of formerly enslaved people place its roots much further back.

Scholars point out that river baptism carried layered meaning for enslaved Africans and their descendants, joining Christian practice to older African understandings of water as a source of life, a means of purification, and a place of spiritual regeneration. When a congregation walked down to the creek, they were doing something with a very long memory behind it.

"Take Me to the River II" by Ted Ellis.

07/26/2026

"The Squad," as they were affectionately known, were more than just friends - they were sisters by choice. This group of women, bound together by shared history and deep-rooted companionship, had grown up side by side. Through scraped knees on the playground, heartbreaks in high school, graduations, marriages, children, and even the occasional heartache and loss, they steadfastly stood by each other.

Their bond was unshakeable, forged in the crucible of life's highs and lows. The laughter and tears they shared had woven an intricate tapestry of love and support that transcended time and distance. No matter where life took them, they knew they could always count on "The Squad" to be there, a testament to their enduring friendship.

Before the white headstones at Arlington Cemetery, there was a schoolhouse, a hospital, a church, and nearly 3,000 peopl...
07/24/2026

Before the white headstones at Arlington Cemetery, there was a schoolhouse, a hospital, a church, and nearly 3,000 people living the first free lives most had ever known.

In June 1863, the federal government opened Freedman's Village on Arlington Heights, on the estate where Confederate General Robert E. Lee had lived. It was built as a way station for people walking out of slavery. For thirty-seven years, they lived and built on this land.

The village had a 50-bed hospital, a home for the aged, a school that drew 150 students on its opening day, and workshops turning out blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and tailors.

They founded Old Bell Baptist, Little Zion Methodist, and an Odd Fellows lodge.

Sojourner Truth spent a year there. When Maryland slaveholders crossed the river and seized young men from the village, the mothers raised such a commotion that guards jailed them. Truth got them out, showed them how to press charges in court, something the law had never allowed them to do, and their sons came home.

When the Marylanders threatened to lock her in the guardhouse too, she answered, "If you do, I will make this nation rock like a cradle."

In 1900, the government took the land back, and the families were made to leave. Residents had spent decades building homes and working that ground, and the payment they were offered for those improvements was far less than they believed it was worth. They left anyway, and they left with a plan.

They bought land.

William Butler and Henry Holmes, both village leaders and Odd Fellows, founded the streetcar suburb Butler-Holmes.

Mount Olive Baptist, born from a split inside the village, bought two acres and built Queen City.

Families bought plots off Bazil Hall's subdivided farm and made Hall's Hill. Others put down roots in Green Valley and Johnson's Hill.

Freedman's Village was never the town. It was the seed.

Everybody's got that friend.The one whose fish gets a little bigger every time they tell the story. It started out a res...
07/22/2026

Everybody's got that friend.

The one whose fish gets a little bigger every time they tell the story. It started out a respectable catch and by the time they are telling the story for the fifth time it's a monster that nearly yanked him clean off the rocks and into the water.....LOL.

Annie Lee had a friend like that too and she documented it in this work of art.

Look at this crew out on the rocks, gear scattered everywhere, one man mid-story with his arms flung wide to show just how big the thing was.

You can't read a single expression on anybody. You don't need to. The whole tall tale lives in the tilt of his shoulders and the way the others are only half listening. Body language does the work a face usually would. That was her signature, and nobody pulled it off like she did.

Critics called her style Black Americana.

Born in Gadsden, Alabama and raised in Chicago, Annie Lee worked years as a railroad clerk and studied art at night before she ever hung a canvas. She was fifty when she had her first gallery show and all the artwork sold out in four hours.

What she gave us was everyday Black life treated like it mattered. A fishing trip where the real catch is the company and the "true story" somebody's telling with a completely straight face.

So tag that friend. The one with that fish story. You know who they are....LOL. Tag them and let them know this painting is for them.

"It Was This Big" by Annie Lee 🎣 🎣

Like the dawn breaking through darkness, like the soul that refuses to be diminished, you rise. With every challenge fac...
07/21/2026

Like the dawn breaking through darkness, like the soul that refuses to be diminished, you rise. With every challenge faced and every barrier overcome, you embody the strength of generations who declared, "Still, I rise." This art serves as a daily affirmation, a visual anthem of resilience that speaks to the unbreakable spirit within us all.

Charles Bibbs' "I Rise" captures the essence of triumph in its purest form. This powerful, limited-edition giclee print portrays a majestic Black woman in profile, her flowing hair cascading like a waterfall of strength, adorned in intricately patterned robes that tell stories of heritage and pride. Her upward gaze radiates determination, dignity, and an unwavering resolve that transcends the canvas itself.

"I Rise" represents not just exceptional African American art but a rare opportunity to own a piece that celebrates Black excellence, feminine power, and cultural resilience.

In 1821, the U.S. Attorney General ruled that no free Black man was qualified to command an American vessel. In 1822, Ab...
07/20/2026

In 1821, the U.S. Attorney General ruled that no free Black man was qualified to command an American vessel. In 1822, Absalom Boston took command of the Industry anyway.

Following Paul Cuffe, the Black captain who sailed with all-Black crews, he set out for the Atlantic grounds as the first Black captain to command a whaleship crewed entirely by Black men. Six months later, he brought her home with every man alive.

He never captained again.

The federal ruling was only the start. That December, South Carolina began jailing free Black sailors who came into port. Georgia quarantined any ship with a Black crew for forty days. Other states followed. Even Cuffe's family business collapsed. For a Black man at sea, a voyage could now cost him his freedom.

So Boston made the rest of his history on shore.

He helped found the African Meeting House, a church, school, and meeting hall that his community built, owned, and ran. He kept a store and a boarding house in New Guinea, the island's Black neighborhood. In 1839, he became the first Black Nantucketer to run for public office.

In 1845, after a five-year fight in which Black families boycotted the schools and petitioned the legislature, Boston sued the town of Nantucket over the exclusion of Black students from the island's only high school.

The schools desegregated.

Going to court ran in the family. In 1773, the family that had enslaved his uncle, Prince Boston, went to court to seize the wages Prince earned aboard a whaleship. They lost. Prince kept the money and won his freedom. This case is credited with ending slavery on Nantucket. Absalom was born free twelve years later. Free to sail.

For years, people came to the island's Historic Coloured Cemetery looking for his grave, only to leave without finding it. He never had a headstone. This Juneteenth, Nantucket set a monument for him and his wife Hannah Cook Boston, the first female steamship stewardess.

Learn more about African American whalers in the new exhibition "From Sea to Shining Sea: Whalers of the African Diaspora" which opens July 25 at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum.

Salsa didn't start in a ballroom or on a dance floor with good lighting. It started in the rural east of Cuba, in Son Cu...
07/19/2026

Salsa didn't start in a ballroom or on a dance floor with good lighting. It started in the rural east of Cuba, in Son Cubano, where Spanish string tradition met African rhythm and African call-and-response, and neither one gave ground.

The clave holds it together, that two-bar pattern every other instrument has to answer to. The congas, the bongos, the timbales, all of them descended from West and Central African drums.

Then Salsa moved from Cuba's countryside into Havana, and then from Havana into New York.

In the 1940s, Machito and Mario Bauzá fused Afro-Cuban rhythms into big band jazz and lit the room on fire. Puerto Rican musicians carried it further, incorporating elements of bomba and plena into the music. Musicians like Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri. And out front of all of it, Celia Cruz, the Cuban voice that became the sound of an era. By the 1960s and 70s, Fania put a name on it. Salsa. One word for a pot that Afro-Cubans and Afro-Puerto Ricans had kept simmering for three hundred years.

Michael Angelo Wallace paints that sound.

Look at the shape of the canvas. It is tall and narrow, and that is a decision, not an accident. Boxed into a column that steep, the dancers have nowhere to go but up, and the whole composition runs vertical like a note held too long. Their joined hands, sitting at the very top of the frame.

Wallace is not painting a room as it appeared. He is painting it at the volume it was playing. Purple, emerald, and orange sit right next to each other with no soft transitions to cool them down, because the music has no soft transitions either. Even the piano keys refuse to lie flat. They arc through the upper half of the painting like a phrase bending.

His figures stretch past what bodies actually do, because that is what the music does to you. The horn, the keys, the speakers, they are not sitting on a stage behind the dancers. They are the architecture. The sound is not coming from a corner of the room. It is the room. Piano, horn, hip, heel, all of it one continuous thing.

Stare at this work of art long enough, and you will hear the rhythm, the count and the sounds of Salsa.

"Salsa" by Michael Wallace

The day is here.Nicole Carr, congratulations. Today your debut book hits shelves, and the work you poured your heart, yo...
06/16/2026

The day is here.

Nicole Carr, congratulations. Today your debut book hits shelves, and the work you poured your heart, your scholarship, and your family's legacy into is finally in our hands.

"The Price of Exclusion: The Pursuit of Healthcare in a Segregated Nation" (HarperCollins) is out NOW!

This is the buried history of Black medical pioneers like Onesimus, an enslaved African who brought the practice of inoculation to the American colonies, and many more. At the heart of the book is Nicole's own great-grandfather, Dr. Lawrence St. Clair Ferguson, a Jamaican-born WWI veteran who practiced medicine in Philadelphia during the 1918 flu pandemic.

Nicole, thank you for the gift. We are reading.

Order your copy and learn more at: https://www.nicolefcarr.com

I would give anything to walk back into that kitchen one more time.To hear my auntie's laugh from across the room before...
05/29/2026

I would give anything to walk back into that kitchen one more time.

To hear my auntie's laugh from across the room before I even saw her. To feel my grandmother's hand on the back of my neck as she passed behind my chair. To watch my uncle slip a piece of cornbread to the smallest cousin when nobody was looking. To smell whatever was simmering on the stove and know, without anyone telling me, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

We didn't know we were living in the good times.

That's the part that aches the most. We thought there would always be another gathering. Another Sunday. Another holiday where everybody made it home. We were too young to notice that the elders were teaching us how to be a family just by being one. We were too busy chasing the cousins through the house to realize we were standing in the middle of something we'd spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to.

Now the table is smaller.

Some chairs are empty that used to be full. Some voices we'd give anything to hear again live only in our memories now. The recipes don't taste the same when the hands that made them are gone. The house feels different. The holidays feel different. And every once in a while, in the middle of an ordinary day, the smell of something cooking or the sound of an old song will catch us off guard, and we'll have to sit down for a minute, because the missing is just too heavy to carry standing up.

But here is what I have come to know.

The good times don't disappear. They live in us. In the way I hug my children, the way my grandmother hugged me. In the way I season the greens, because I watched my auntie do it a thousand times. In the laugh, I didn't realize I'd inherited it until somebody told me I sound just like her. The elders left more than memories. They left a blueprint. And every time we gather, every time we cook together, every time we make space at the table for the ones we love, we are keeping the good times alive.

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