Vignettes
Vignettes is a mosaic novel told through small, intimate stories—each one unfolding over just a few days in the life of a woman. Every vignette stands on its own, like a complete short story, with its own voice, mood, and world.
At first, the women seem entirely different from one another: a polished MBA executive, a broke single Black mother of three, a free-spirited artist, a professor, a woman working in Silicon Valley. Their appearances and identities vary too—straight hair, curls, kinky hair, African braids; deeply religious in one story, spiritually uncertain in another, even questioning God altogether.
But as the vignettes accumulate, subtle clues begin to surface. A gesture. A memory. A fear. A desire. What first reads as a collection of separate women gradually reveals itself as something deeper: these are not different people at all, but fragments of the same woman—different selves, different seasons, different ways of surviving and becoming.
Vignettes is a portrait of identity at the particle level: layered, contradictory, and profoundly human.
Origin
This project is very much a memoir of my many roles and experiences over 50 years and how the people I encountered saw a close up on one part of my total self and made fair and sometimes unfair assumptions. I had fun with it sometimes. Walking into the metaphorical room and seeing who they thought I was, then revealing something that surprised, sometimes shocked them, leaving people grappling with the humility of limited perceptions. I believe everyone of us is humbled by our assumptions about others, once we learn a broader truth about them.
It can also create too narrow perceptions and cause harm. I remember when I was a young black mother of one and had a friend who was also a young black mother of two and was living on Medicaid and food stamps. At the time there were vitriolic political strife about lazy, licentious, irresponsible, single and ignorant black mothers leeching off of others.
Then I spent the day with her, her husband, and two sons in the family student housing on the UC Berekley campus where they were getting their Masters degree in Sociology and Theology. A couple that chose to marry young, so they could preserve their chastity until marriage and grow a family alongside their education and careers. A couple who later became great contributors to the social safety net as upper middle class tax payers. She became a tenured professor at Princeton and wrote many published books that influenced the design of humane technology. Whose sons have gone on to get degrees at Princeton and UCLA.
The assumptions of the time were black women that were the main people “leeching” off the system, when the actual statistics were that the majority of people using medicaid and food stamps were low-income white people.
The narrative and visualizations that have been hurled at black women for hundreds of years in this country are again false. So when someone heard about my friend having two kids and being black and living off the system, they were shocked at their assumptions when they learned who she was more broadly.
