![]() ![]() Shortly after her mother dies, Aasim, Rue’s previously absent father, returns to reveal that she is a demigod of the land of Ghizon. The book follows 17-year-old Rue as she reels from her mother’s murder in Houston’s fictional East Row. Although the novel’s literal magic lies in the fictional land of Ghizon, Black girls from Houston are depicted as they have always been-alchemical, making a way out of no way. Less attention is given to the environments that make those people possible the grandmamas and mamas cooking gumbo, watching somebody else’s kids, braiding hair on the stoop first thing on a Saturday morning. The first-generation student who beat the odds, the basketball star who worked his way out. ![]() Too often, mass media paints the story of Black girl magic as the story of the individual. It’s a city where in the face of gentrification, redlining, and the afterlife of chattel slavery, you can see things you imagine. ![]() For Solange, as it is for many of the Black folks who call the Bayou City home, Houston is a community where someone sets a place for you, no matter how long you’ve been gone. When I Get Home, Houston-born Solange’s 2019 album, is an ode to “a kind of Houston of the mind” -grounded yet ephemeral, breezy yet intentional, capacious and Black-owned. ![]()
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