Remembering Sandra Bland’s Death in the Place I Call Home

Last summer, I travelled with my infant daughter from our apartment in Brooklyn to Dixie, Georgia, to spend a month with my mother-in-law, whom I affectionately call Mama Marable. Her immaculate three-bedroom brick house sits on twenty-three acres of land, most of which she rents out to local farmers. To get to the house, you have to travel on a farm road for about a mile, past an Ag-Pro dealership that sells John Deere farm equipment, with endless rows of cotton on both sides. The nights are so dark my husband insists that, were his car to break down more than four hundred yards from the house, he would stay put until morning.