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Perched on the limb of the leaning post oak tree, Pearlie Mae Jenkins watched as the young woman struggled down the sidewalk. She carried an armful of brown paper sacks, and a stuffed bookbag hung on her back. She paused briefly at the historical plaque in front of the Freedman’s Cemetery Memorial. When she stood before the bronze monument of The Sentinel (protector of the site from ever being desecrated again), she set her sacks down and bowed to him. Then she knelt in front of The Prophetess, the Griot, and began praying, Iba se Egun. 

      The young woman made her way to the bench inside the gate and dropped down next to the homeless man. He came almost every day, parked his shopping cart in the grass, outside of the fence, on the northwest side of the cemetery. After organizing her bags, she unfolded her long legs and meandered down the walkway toward the monument of the emancipated couple. She sobbed as she traced the welts on the man’s back with her forefinger. Could she be the one Pearlie Mae had been waiting for? 

Angela squeezed her way to the foot of the stage where the opening notes to the familiar song had started, bringing the hundreds of fans packed into the Granada Theater to a frenzied crescendo. The song began with a simple rhythmic beat, soon overlaid with earsplitting feedback, followed by an ominous bass line that would be repeated over and over, accompanying the hypnotic chorus. A chorus that the audience started to chant, even before the lead singer opened his mouth to sing.

Angela was ostensibly there to write an article about the British band, made famous in the ’80s for this signature song. An entertainment writer for the city’s newspaper, she especially loved writing about musical acts that performed at the one-time movie theater, still decorated with the original art deco murals. The sound system was superb, and the theater was known for hosting some of the best bands from the glory days of punk and glam rock: beautiful, skinny boys and girls, with pale complexions, dramatic face paint, and large libidos.

But really, Angela was there to write about vampires. In particular, those supernatural creatures who hid in plain sight, touring as English rock bands. She’d secured a book deal, one with a hefty advance and a handshake deal with the publisher not to announce it before she was ready. She was going to blow open the secretive world of British bloodsuckers. Her revenge for being spurned.  

It was the men on the boat who did it. Two of them. Fishing boat. Jackets Army surplus or faded to close enough. Hats with the bills low over their eyes. Maybe there were beer bottles in their hands. Maybe just rods. They were higher up than the kayakers, their gazes, their voices descending, aimed low as they called out to hail them, “Watch out for the alligators!” 

And whether they meant to tease or haze or frighten or warn, whether they were ill-informed this would be funny or that there was anything bigger than nutria in these waters, whether this was the greeting of all seasoned lake folk one to another and their winks hidden under their caps, they tripped something ancient and dark and deep, and with those careless words they summoned her.

Hazards flash. A pedal pumps. Something reminiscent of both an egret and a crustacean—but neither—attends its suspension above curves more commonly felt than beheld. Diamonds (red, yellow, blue) within diamonds (unmarked) merge four and five levels below. Fumes fume. Buttresses hang. Gusts imitate an ocean. Signs cycle through their alphabets and arithmetic. Shadows stories high fork back to reach some gnomon, eclipsing only the most golden stars. The evening stampede on I-635 bottlenecks, gridlock becoming a solar array. Smithereens of assemble-it-yourself baby furniture, shingles, sacks of Quikrete pinball off barricades more refracted than luminescent. Creeper vans draft behind white Silverados and Rams. Inside cabins of Cutlasses and PT Cruisers, beige velour sags away from neoprene sponge that’s lost its spring to controlled climates. Yielding loses patience. Patience evades restlessness. Locks lock. Abrasions—grumbling treads, swirls of dry leaves—imitate an ocean. Maladaptations to a childhood’s hardscrabble roads pan and tilt in an inner ear. Lanes stacked at noon look like staves, conveyances like an automatic transcription of arpeggios. As the Doppler effect rushes northbound on U.S.-75, a hymn is borne toward the anthemic. A lone raindrop, oblate as a penny-press souvenir, unloads a dirty wish on tinted glass. Clay gets intimate with chalk, salt with sand. Pilots buckle in to the rear of engineers. Arguments imitate an ocean.

My aunt, Dimple Snodgrass, is a real estate agent. She drives a cream-colored Lexus—the hybrid model because we all have to do our part. 

She’s a real go-getter, the top producer in her office. Her motto: “Keep It Simple With Dimple!” 

The Lexus glides into an empty spot on top of a two-story parking garage. The garage is in Preston Center, an oasis of offices and stores in North Dallas surrounded by expensive homes, many of which have sold because of Dimple’s effective marketing campaigns and her willingness to stab a colleague in the back.

She exits the car in a haze of White Shoulders perfume, her platinum hair teased up high and wide.

“Hello, Charlie,” she says. “How long has it been?”

“Howdy, Aunt Dimple.” I force a smile on my face. She’s family and all, but I don’t much care for her.

“Been meaning to have you over for dinner,” she says. “Work’s been crazy. I’m bouncing around like popcorn in a hot skillet.”

Aunt Dimple has never had me over for dinner. She only calls when she needs my special skills. 

I guess you could call me a clairvoyant. Every now and then, if the conditions are right, I sense things that other people can’t. Supposedly my grandfather, who died before I was born, had the same condition. No one else in the family does. Maybe it skips a generation, though I had an uncle who once claimed he saw into the future after listening to a Ray Wylie Hubbard CD while tripping on peyote.

Sometimes it’s just a color, like what the psychics call an aura. Other times it’s an image that might or might not make sense. Right before she broke up with me, my last girlfriend looked like a pair of Florsheim shoes, black wingtips polished to a high gloss. 

You might think the Florsheims had something to do with whoever she was leaving me for. But after she dumped me, she swore off romantic entanglements and was killed three days later by a drunk soccer mom in an Escalade. The soccer mom was wearing Manolo Blahniks.

Aunt Dimple points to a row of dingy one-story buildings next to the parking garage. “Look out there, Charlie. What do you see?”

I can see a sandwich shop and a nail salon that advertises half-price pedicures on Tuesdays. I’m not a businessperson, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t what she’s talking about. 

“What am I supposed to see?” I ask.

“Opportunity, Charlie. A land play. Those buildings need to be torn down for new development.”

August 28, 2001

I didn’t plan to be here on my 21st birthday, but Ree and them decided at the last minute, early this morning, that they was gone throw me a party tonight, and I ain’t have nothing new to wear. When we got here, I thought The Gap was the only store we was gone hit. It’s the only store I ever hit in NorthPark. A mall that got the nerve to be the closest one to where I live on Skillman but ain’t got nothing in it I can afford. The Gap one of the only stores that ain’t a big department store, like Dillard’s or Neiman, that got its own entrance and exit. Ain’t even got to go all the way in the mall. The Gap the only store in NorthPark I mess with like that.

And then Ree decided to cross the threshold and go into the mall. Decided she wanted to get me some perfume for my birthday. I told her I wasn’t going with her; I’d wait for her on the bench outside the store. Tried to talk her out of going, but Ree ain’t that type of person you can talk into or out of anything. Last week, she asked me for a ride to Mervyn’s in Garland. Was only posed to get outfits for our kids’ day at the zoo. After I had safely, carefully, outsmarted the dressing room clerk, popped the sensor with my pig-nose driver, and stuffed a single outfit into my bag behind the cover of the curtain, she told me to pull the car up front. I wasn’t expecting her to run out the store with her arms fill of clothes, but she did. I didn’t expect her to apologize for making me an accomplice to her theft over 50, and she didn’t.

So today, when she announced her plan, when I failed to talk her out of it, I asked her to let me say a prayer for her, and she got mad with me.

What are you more tired of, getting teased about your age or your last name? I find it more humorous when people mess up my last name. Or they relate it to the beer and say I’m graduating from law school, but I’m not old enough to crack a beer. 

SMU obviously knows you’re its youngest law school grad, at 19, but how can we be sure you’re the country’s youngest female law school grad? A lot of research that my father and I did. Law schools keep pretty good records of who graduated, how they did on the bar, graduation rates, things like that. There were a couple people overseas that did it at 18. I think there was a young man who did it at 18 here in the country. I’m the youngest woman, period, and the youngest African American, regardless of gender. 

Of all the national media attention you’ve gotten, obviously this Q&A is the biggest thing you’ve done. Aside from this, though, have you done anything that has blown your mind? When I graduated from TWU at 16, Good Morning America flew me out to New York, and then they came to Texas to get video of me graduating from SMU. That was pretty awesome. Also, Essence wrote a story on me, and I think that was pretty cool, too. 

An October afternoon under Big Tex’s shadow is where high school English teacher Bobby Jimenez found himself. Boy, he thought to himself, he sure is tall: size 70 boots, a 95-gallon hat, and his booming voice—how long could Mr. Jimenez stand there waiting for his high school students? He was their chaperone for the Creative Arts exhibit field trip and it was hotter than blue blazes. Collecting Coke cans for half-price tickets, the class coordinated a field trip to the State Fair of Texas so they could capture context for their own projects. Did Mr. Jimenez ever dream they’d dedicate themselves to lessons on Dallas by deriving meaning from the denim Dickies Big Tex wore or did they ask what it means to depict downtown denizens alongside their own teenaged lives? Easy as pie was how Mr. Jimenez pitched the assignment to them and it became more of a question as the students couldn’t open their notebooks to begin essaying.

My kid’s feet are bigger than his bedroom, so we decided it’s probably time to start looking for a new house to fill with our shin guards and never-used craft supplies. And the timing really couldn’t be better. Right now, everyone is paying $4 million over the asking price and the description of every house includes words like “BEST AND FINAL OFFERS ONLY.”

It’s super. 

Interest rates are going up. There’s a recession looming. And inventory of houses is still near record lows. From a recent Zillow report dated May 19: “Over the next three months, Zillow expects home values to grow 5.2 percent, down from an expectation for 5.5 percent growth in the previous month’s forecast. Zillow’s forecast for existing home sales has been lowered as well, now predicting 5.73 million sales in 2022. That would mark a 6.4 percent decrease from 2021.”

Translation: your Dallas home-buying forecast calls for 100 percent chance of bidding over asking against 110 potential buyers while the house is still marked “Coming Soon” on Zillow (no pictures available).

Even though it’s the worst time to try to buy a house and the whole process of counting your pennies to figure out what you can even afford is incredibly stressful, you get caught up in the excitement. Like, way too caught up. When you get a notification that “There’s a house in your zone!” the heart skips a beat. “In your price range!” You feel the promise of a forever-65-degrees-and-sunny future overtake you. “And zoned for your preferred elementary school!” Holy outdoor kitchen. The Wordle can wait.

You click the link, and the description starts off great: “This two-story stunner in the sought-after neighborhood of White Lake Hollowlands boasts a master suite on the first floor for ease of passing out after a long week of trying to pay off this house, and so much shiplap, it’s an actual ship now. You ship this home.” But then comes the bad news: “This isn’t a house—it’s an experience.” Oh, no. 

On a sunny morning in February, I’m standing in the center of the George W. Bush Presidential Center just after opening. Shooting out of the floor is a rusted, crumpled steel brace recovered from one of the World Trade Center buildings. A docent rushes to intercept me. I’ll call him Speedy, in the spirit of the nickname-​​loving president. Speedy says I can go ahead and touch. I politely decline. 

“Where are you from?” Speedy asks me, as we whirl around the elliptical exhibition room. I try to explain that I’m visiting from New York City, where I know many people whose lives were forever changed by the events of that morning. But Speedy, a middle-aged New Englander who came to Dallas decades ago for reasons unknown, isn’t listening. He has information to impart: about the timing of the planes; about a photo of the Florida schoolroom where an aide told the president, “America is under attack”; about what was found in the rubble.

I’ve heard it all before—in the months after the tragedy, at the ground zero site, on every anniversary. But then Speedy, who has the high cheeks and squished eyes of a political cartoon, says something that snaps me to attention: airplanes could not have brought down the towers. They were built to withstand such an impact. Just look at this video playing on a loop of this news host live on air, calling what has just occurred an “explosion.” I suck in my breath, afraid to influence the strange encounter unfolding before me, desperate to see it through. “The more you learn about 9/11,” Speedy says, “the more questions you have.” 

That’s when I realize I’ve just paid $26 to be guided through Bush’s legacy by a man who thinks the September 11 attacks may have been an inside job. 

The city of Dallas’ new top environmental watchdog, Carlos Evans, is a lifer from the Environmental Protection Agency. His nearly two decades with the agency saw a slow awakening that has reached the highest levels of government: American cities have systematically shunted industry and pollution into lower-income neighborhoods, where people of color have suffered disproportionate incidences of illness, from asthma to cancer. The dirty businesses have perpetuated poverty cycles by creating barriers to economic growth and depressing property values.

Under the Obama administration, the EPA began incorporating environmental justice strategies into policy under the declaration that “every American deserves clean air, water, and land.” Evans was part of the team that established Plan EJ 2014, a policy document and toolkit that infused environmental justice matters into rulemaking, permitting, compliance, and enforcement. It built out community programs that provided a new avenue for input from residents that could inform decisions happening at the federal level. And then he switched roles within the agency, using his legal background to hold industrial businesses accountable.

For the last six years, Evans has worked as an enforcement attorney for the EPA, pursuing violators of the Clean Air Act and finding ways to cut their emissions. Those bona fides set him up nicely for what awaits him here in Dallas, a city reckoning with its own racist land use and environmental decisions. As the director of the Office of Environmental Quality and Sustainability, he’ll lead implementation of the city’s first-ever climate action plan, which proposes 97 steps to reach carbon net-neutrality by 2050.