HOW DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT?

“I have made major decisions in my life because of my dreams,” he told me.

A YEAR AGO on Christmas Day, Michael Anatole attempted to sleep in a homeless shelter in downtown Manhattan. It was a room filled with 70-some men in a space that stank of unwashed clothes and body odor, and it constantly erupted with the cacophonic tumult of street life crammed inside one dimly lit dormitory-style room. Sleep […]

“I’m always thinking, what’s my next move?”

"I lay there shaking. And then I try to be quiet again.”

“I was talking to my sister the other day and we were like: ‘Do we need to get a gun?'"

It’s as if I have been drafted by a war against regular suburban people.”

“Falling into bed is about embracing the only portion of the day that I own.”

“I couldn’t get through to people how much in a panic I was."

"I know there is a God. I beat homelessness and prostate cancer."

“I’m OK during the day, but my fear comes at night. I start to shake uncontrollably.”

“I started doing CPR and security came and I cradled him in my arms and yelled: ‘ Elder Smith come back!’ And then he took his last breath. I went into my office and sobbed.”

I feel so inept culturally—like, as a Black person I don’t really know who I am. I had not heard about the Tulsa riot or the Black Wall Street until two or three years ago. I was blown away.

Sometimes, the white noise helps to drown it all out. But that Sunday, the fans weren’t enough. Nor was the two-hour Epsom salt soak in her bathtub jacuzzi. Or watching Frozen on Netflix with her three boys.