The first time I left Jamaica, I was seventeen. I’d graduated from high school two years before, and while trying to get myself to college I’d been scouted as a model. And so I found myself at the Wilhelmina Models office in Miami, surrounded by South Beach’s finest glass windows with all my glass hopes, face to face with a famous onenamed model who was now in her sixties. When her gaze halted at my dreadlocks, I shouldn’t have been surprised at what came next.
“Can you cut the dreads?” she asked, as she flipped through my portfolio, her soft accent blunting the impact of the words.
Back home in Kingston, hair stylists would leave my dreadlocks untouched, tied up in a ponytail with my good black ribbon, deciding that the problem of my hair was insolvable.
“Sorry,” I said. “My father won’t allow me.”
She glanced over at the agent who had brought me in.
“It’s her religion,” he explained. “Her father is Rastafarian. Very strict.”
The road between my father and me was woven in my hair, long spools of dreadlocks tethering me to him, across time, across space. Everywhere I went, I wore his mark, a sign to the bredren in his Rastafari circle that he had his house under control. Once, when I was feeling brave, I had asked my father why he chose Rastafari for himself, for us. “I and I don’t choose Rasta,” he told me, using the plural “I” because Jah’s spirit is always with a Rasta bredren. “I and I was born Rasta.” I turned his reply over in my mouth like a coin.
Denne historien er fra August 07, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra August 07, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Drug of Choice - The natural world contains many billions of potential medications. The question is how to find the ones that work.
AI. is transforming the way medicines are made. Bacteria produce numerous molecules that could become medicines, but most of them aren’t easily identified or synthesized with the technology that exists today. A small percentage of them, however, can be constructed by following instructions in the bacteria’s DNA. Burian helped me search the sequence for genes that looked familiar enough to be understandable but unfamiliar enough to produce novel compounds. We settled on a string of DNA that coded for seven linked amino acids, the same number found in vancomycin. Then Burian introduced me to Robert Boer, a synthetic chemist who would help me conjure our drug candidate.
Screams from a Marriage
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
Fly with Me
The children’s books of Katherine Rundell.
The Mystery of Pain
Garth Greenwell’s novel of extreme affliction and ordinary happiness.
The Show Must Go On
What if Ronald Reagan’ Presidency never really ended?
LAST COFFEEHOUSE ON TRAVIS
For a few months, I stayed with my aunt's friend in Midtown, back when she could still afford to live there.
Tales from the New World
The novelist Richard Powers considers our changing earth.
Land of the Flea
What America 1s buying and selling.
The Dark Time
On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging.
The Post-Moral Age
If conscience is merely a biological artifact, must we give up on goodness?
