If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan
Sometimes short stories can feel like painful exercises to me. Their brevity can feel like roots being ripped up before the plant has blossomed and fruited. Or their experimentation peacocky: beautiful, transfixing, but a little unsure of its purpose. If I Had Two Wings took pain, brevity, beauty, a little flashiness, and alchemized them together with a sure purpose full of roots, blossoms, and fruits.
Set primarily, but not entirely, in Black communities in the fictional Tims Creek, North Carolina, these stories felt like honorific lines to Kenan’s communities and ancestors both near and distant. They were spiritual in this way, but with a spirituality that didn’t exclude humor and irreverence. Kenan’s stories include a disgraced White man’s haunting by a troublemaking hog; a series of miracles worked by Velmajean Swearington Hoyt, a humble mega church member; and the ghosts or spirits of enslaved people weaving in and out of daily life in a man’s new house when his lover is away. These stories are full of worship, queerness, spirits, food, the South, communities in all their smallness and expanse. Though they often end in a way open for further dreaming, this open-endedness doesn’t result in a sense of unfinishedness. Instead, it feels like an invitation, a window cracked open and inviting the spirit to come through—the other side is just that close.
Randall Kenan died this year on August 28. Rest in power.