D-FW author LaToya Watkins' collection of short stories makes effective use of Black American vernacular.
For unless you live a very privileged and circumscribed life, Watkins’ characters are people most of us know, or at least people we know about. They live right here in Texas, and they touch all of our lives in myriad ways, be it intimately or merely in passing.Watkins opens doors and windows into their homes, lives, hopes and sorrows, and in so doing opens our minds and hearts to their humanity and brokenness.
In “Cutting Horse,” for example, there is Ridley Johnson, a cowboy from the east side of Lubbock who loves the horses on his little ranch. Ridley also deals drugs on the side — until he meets Nicole, a Texas Tech student who is way above his pay grade, and they fall in love.“Them pretty brown eyes and that sugar-brown skin was everything to me.” Ridley stops selling drugs and gives up his cowboy gear and his gold teeth, all to make Nicole happy.
But then they move to Dallas and buy a split-level in an HOA neighborhood full of white folks. As the Black Lives Matter movement crests, Ridley retreats into a backyard tent to read books and watch TV channels that are about two things, “animals and black men dying.” The tent doesn’t sit well with either Nicole or the HOA.
When their neighbors report that a valuable runaway cutting horse has wandered into Ridley’s backyard and is quietly grazing there, he doesn’t do what he knows he should, which is to surrender the animal to authorities. Instead, with Nicole pleading and police sirens wailing, suddenly Ridley and the horse are off: “I’m on her back, looking to her, and she taking the street to the sky with a smile on her face, like this always was our plan.
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