Concerns around the pressures of respectability, authenticity, and self-definition bubble to the surface-sometimes popping with revelation, other times floating back into the depths to settle among unknowns. Most of the stories take place in Southern California and involve characters from middle-class to upper-middle class backgrounds. Rather than focusing on what has changed ( “…nothing had really changed”), the stories share an examination, rearrangement, and satirization of the complex valences connected to the word head: literal, psychological, jurisdictional, scholarly, macabre. Instead, the eleven stories found in Heads of the Colored People gesture toward and depart from the inspiring source material. Thompson-Spires was drawn to the exercise of updating Smith’s 19th century glimpses of black citizenship to our contemporary times, but found the actual process of “hold on to his framework” limiting. Adopting the pseudonym “Communipaw,” Smith’s sketches appeared in Frederick Douglass’s Paper under the title “Heads of the Colored People Done with a Whitewashed Brush,” and featured washerwomen, news vendors, and gravediggers. In her author’s note, Nafissa Thompson-Spires explains that the initial spark for her debut collection came out of a desire “to write back” to the literary sketches of James McCune Smith, a Black abolitionist writer and surgeon.
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