Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

Poet Kevin Young critiques the racism embedded in the American prison system, using the music of Black blues musician Howlin’ Wolf as a model for his poem. The poem thus reads like a blues lament about the current American prison system. This system simply substitutes and grew out of Black Americans’ enslavement. Young writes, “Under/the hard sun/of your smile/we see/stripes like those/that once/lined the slave’s/unbent back” (206). Imprisoned Black men toil on the land around Parchman Prison (the Mississippi state penitentiary) just as their enslaved ancestors worked the fields of white-owned plantations in the antebellum South. The prison and the slave plantation are the same place.

Karen Russell’s contribution to this anthology is part personal essay and part investigative journalism. She writes of her time living above a homeless shelter in Portland and her subsequent quest to purchase a house. She outlines the problems that have caused a surge in the city’s homeless population, negative responses to the homeless, and the civic government’s attempts to address the housing crisis.

In 2014, Russell and her boyfriend settled in Portland in an affordable rental. She soon discovered why it was inexpensive: There was a homeless shelter located below, and at night the air was thick with noise.