The Best American Essays 2020 has just released the winning selections for this year, and we are proud to announce that “Breathe” by Jerald Walker is among them.
Walker’s “Breathe” was featured in NER 40.3. The Best American Essays 2020 was curated by guest editor André Aciman and series editor Robert Atwan, and will be published October 6, 2020.
You can read or listen to Walker’s piece on our website.
Congratulations, Jerald, and all the other essayists celebrated in this year’s anthology!
Nonfiction from NER 41.1
I. APRIL FOOLS
History begins with someone else’s memory of you. It begins with accepting that memory as your own. I want to remember the sensation of curling into my grandfather’s woolly armpit as he reads to me months before he died. A stack of books in bed with us. But all I can remember is climbing up the furry stairs on all fours and looking over the top step into his bedroom to see if he’s awake. To see if he can read to me. What I remember is the anticipation of warmth, of the perfect fit between my two-year-old body and my grandfather’s armpit. My sensations end with carpet and hope. The only lie I repeatedly tell is when I claim my mother’s memory of these reading sessions as my own, a history in tenderness.
Nonfiction from NER 41.1 (2020)
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The first time someone called me a spic was during recess or after school in the playground or in the park across the street from my house. I was in shirtsleeves and it was hot or I had on a heavy winter coat with a ski hat and gloves and boots because it had snowed overnight and we could see our breath in the frigid winter cold.
Nonfiction from NER 40.4 (2019)
When folks say the war was about states’ rights, that was the right—the right to hold people as property . . . That is the history that [the Confederate] flag commemorates.
I was born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, and going to school in the 1980s I said the Pledge of Allegiance along with my classmates, facing the American flag with our hands over our hearts, at the start of each day. I liked the rhythm of the words in my mouth in the cadence we were taught—the syntactical pauses inevitably ran “for which it stands” together to almost become one word. It and those other morsels—“and to the Republic,” “indivisible,” “with liberty / and justice for all”—pleased my tongue and my ear, though first-grade me surely didn’t have enough context to understand to what I was making my pledge.