In a Harper’s article, A Litany for Survival, Naomi Jackson begins with: “When I was a girl, my Bajan grandmother insisted that I recite Psalm 23 every night before bed. I didn’t yet know what death was, but I knew that there was something sinister and brave about repeating the words.

My parents emigrated to the United States from Barbados and Antigua in the late 1970s. They were determined to cloak their children in an armor of education, etiquette, and religion—to protect us from a world that, in the words of Audre Lorde, ‘we were never meant to survive.’ “