01 Coming soon

Untitled memoir

The story before the report.

by Takkeem Leon Morgan

“Speak to the earth, and it will teach you.”

—Job 12:8

02 From the manuscript

Before anyone wrote a report about us, or decided what we were, my father’s voice filled the house. It was deep and heavy, and it carried an echo that lived in the front room and traveled the hallway like a ghost. When he called my name, the sound didn’t just arrive, it wrapped itself around our lead-filled plaster walls before it reached me.

Chapter 01 Sound and structure

This is the only passage that leaves the room until the book does.

03 Why the book

Some stories arrive as files. This one arrives as sound.

  1. i.

    A father whose hands kept time for Sun Ra’s Arkestra — and a family the system tried to catalogue before we’d even been introduced.

  2. ii.

    The block, the church basement, the kitchen table, the Chadwick Street rowhouse. The places third to the report and the record — where the actual raising happened.

  3. iii.

    Why prevention has to sound like somebody’s somebody, not somebody’s case. The through-line from Atakatune’s congas to the work I do now.