On Personal Geography, Or, On the Love of One’s Country
Xavier Prince
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2026 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
"We have no property! We have no wives! We have no children! No city! No country!"
—Slogan for enslaved liberation, 1776
WASHINGTON DC
Winter 2024
DCA
Every winter I come home, and see, in great shining light, the white of the Capitol Building, and the Washington Monument. When my father picks me up from the airport, no matter how many times we've done this, he points out the places and departments where he and my mother used to work: the HUD building, that McDonald's on the corner of 13th and New York Ave. There's this feeling I got, while studying in a dry Ohio town, that while I lived there, at least it wasn't my home. To get to my home one had to fly into the most powerful city in the whole world. This is, of course, also the most violent city in the whole world. My pride is unutterably complicated, and if I attend to it, it could undo me. To begin, I'd like to let it.
MLK Jr. Library
On the phone with my mother, she asks me where I'm at. I answer, and learn that my grandfather used to take my mom here all the time, to get books and for Saturday programs. Today, the building is huge, looking like a modern college campus. The outside of it is covered with aspirational and, surprisingly, critical quotes. Extolling the virtue of democracy as a concept not yet realized.
Earlier that day, I decided, after noticing a sign pointing in its direction, to walk towards the White House. My plan, my new plan, was to look at it, to maybe sketch it, and record my emotional reaction. When I got there, I could not really see the White House. I could see the corners of it, I could see the well-dressed people coming out of the authorized gates, buying umbrellas from the men selling in the street. I could see the police dog that was moved to smell my bag as I approached. Reading online that a better view was from Lafayette Park, I walked that way, where my view was entirely blocked by construction. The inauguration viewing stand. This all was very emblematic, and not very emotional at all.
QUEEN CITY, VA
Winter ~1910
In Queen City, Virginia, George Vollin Jr. works his first job as post office messenger, in junior high. As a boy, he bikes around through the heavy snowfall of Virginia's winter. It would stop him from passing the Highway Bridge to the office. Cops would kick him off the sidewalks even though there was not too much clearing on the streets. "4 to 6 inches of snow. And then another snow would catch it."
A young George Vollin Jr. skated too. Later, in the winter of 1913, he takes his skates and rides the Highway Bridge all the way to Pennsylvania Ave, to the inaugural parade of Woodrow Wilson. I wonder now what George Jr. could see that day. He heard a rousing speech, though. He heard his president say that "There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control, or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts."
George Vollin Jr., around ten or twelve years old, believed this, I imagine. I have to imagine he did.
SALISBURY, MD
2020
Salisbury University
I got my undergraduate degree on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, this place that happens to be in the only red county in the state. When I began, I wanted to be a doctor, but a year in I had swapped to studying English Rhetoric and Philosophy. But I still hadn't thought of myself as a writer. When I met with my mentor to discuss my honors thesis, I was still thinking like a scientist. I had some idea about research. I don't even remember if I explained my idea before he came with his own. By this point I'd taken a couple of writing classes with him, where he'd become familiar with my style and interests. He says, "Why don't you write more about your experiences with racism, and being Black in America? How it's followed you, like how it's inescapable from home to here?" I was taken aback. He was right of course, of course he was right, that this thing existed and it would benefit me to write it out. But I hadn't thought of it at all. I can't be sure I ever would've.
WALDORF, MD
2006-2022
In his book Home, in his essay "The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation", Amiri Baraka argues for a Black National Consciousness. The proposal for a Black nation, or, rather, the acknowledgment that a Black nation already exists, that there just needs be an active recognition of this—in name and politics. A nation oppositional to the white one which surrounds and attempts to cloister it, even going so far as to establish independent international relations. This is an idea which follows from the work of Malcolm X (who followed from the work of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad). This is an idea which sounds good, and animates me, but feels as far-fetched as heaven is. Because they killed Malcolm X. They killed Martin Luther King Jr. too and shaved down his socialist beliefs into consumable tidbits—a library and a statue and a holiday.
The place I'm from is Waldorf, Maryland. The general area is as close as one could get to a Black nation in the United States, having by far the most predominantly Black population. This area is one of the wealthiest concentrations of Black people in the entire world. I say this to say that while the sentiments that might animate the drive toward Black nationhood existed, growing up it seemed to me that the conditions did not.
I've always had dark skin. My Grandma called it "double dip chocolate". Given that, I experienced what I knew was colorism, but rarely ever, I felt, dealt with the racism that colorism's contained in. In my home, for me and my sisters, racism was more often idea than experience—one channeled sometimes through the news, but mostly through my parents, their lives and stories, our culture, Roots-as-required-viewing. That portrait hung up in my family room of a Black man, enslaved, his back facing the viewer, covered in welts and slashes, his wrists wrapped around with American flags, pulling him apart for his beating. The anguish and strength of his single, manly tear. The anguish in the face of that woman who loves him. I would see this every day. The piece is called "A Tribute to Black History". It's huge, and still up in our house. When I'm home now I hardly notice.
This wealthiest Black part of the United States, this would be Black nation, it seemed to me—at the time, to be nothing more than characteristic of the whole nation, of the whole world, honestly. Our suburbs diverse, our interests myriad. Our highly American attitudes and aspirations, the Fourth of July fireworks show at the Washington Monument, Thanksgiving decorations. Us so preppy, so bright, and cool. There was a blinding neoliberal optimism surrounding the whole enterprise, no matter how many times the housing crisis had my family move around. This was so much so that it was only when I was ten or twelve, when my family was hanging around the National Harbor, that I learned that Black people were only 13% of the nation's population. Some informational display, for Black History Month, maybe. What I know is I felt genuine shock, in my stomach, and chest, a new kind of fear, the kind that scoped way out—vertigo of the whole world. The whole wild world it seemed—suddenly I knew nothing about.
ARLINGTON, VA
Winter 2024
Good Donut
Every winter I come home, and I spend time with my old best friends. I'm sitting across from one at breakfast. We've been partying and hanging out for a few days now, so much so that he says to me with an earnest surprise, "You have bags under your eyes!" On the way back to his apartment, this route we've walked a couple of times this winter, I notice, for the first time, a brick structure, spiraling shortly up and stopping, hidden away in a little park. Across the street from Amazon's second headquarters. We approach it, and we learn that it's a monument to Queen City.
Queen City was Black-owned land, and a thriving community in the first third of the 20th century. The people of Queen City were descendants of the residents of Freedman's Village, a settlement established by the federal government in 1862, after Congress passed legislation freeing all enslaved people in DC. Queen City was filled with the new life of former slaves. Black men and women leading a community. Black barbershops, a Black fire department, Black churches, Black businesses. They were focused on the hopeful future, providing education for their children, and were described by George Vollin Jr. as "a real happy, solid community."
In 1931 George Jr. and three other Black Americans enact their belief in equality of opportunity. They try to, anyway. They try to claim some bigger stake and make something theirs. They run for sheriff and county board respectively. None of them win. Vollin Jr. recalls voter intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1940, a William Vollin is ten years old, still playing childhood games. It's unclear if or how he's related to George. He plays hide and seek, he plays marble and ball games. He feels his community is a happy one. Later he'll describe it as a big family.
One year later Queen City is razed to the ground, to make space for the Pentagon. Instead of claiming their stake, their homes, barbershops, businesses and churches are—illegally, William Vollin will point out—possessed under the claim of eminent domain. Their home is promptly burned to ash. The 993 residents of Queen City scattered—north or south. Those that had nowhere to go were afforded a filthy trailer camp, with a "common filthy bathroom where people took showers...temporary structures sat on mud flats."
Queen City was destroyed for the sake of the Second World War. For all those who would "be commuting to and parking at the Pentagon on a daily basis...for [the] Pentagon's needed transportation corridor, which eventually would come to include over thirty miles of highways and ramps, including twenty-one overpasses."
That's the trouble with writing about being Black, about racism in America, "the way it's followed me." It hasn't followed me, really, it's haunted me, in the ugliest, most ambient sense, a history that surrounds in unseen plaques and monuments and highways and ramps and overpasses over bones. Everything is so incredibly clean now. To speak of racism feels like shouting ancient history down empty hallways. While I was born into drenched red country, red with my people's blood, it seems now, on the whole, less interested in that blood, or, less able to access that interest, or less able to access the means to express it. Or the desire is the same, and the means are just different, less recognizable. So meanwhile, I fear my own stories feel petty, suggestive, or strange.
SALISBURY, MD
Fall 2019
Salisbury University
I'm smoking with the offensive lineman and we're watching some Snoop Dogg stoner movie. There is at one point a Black video vixen. One player says, "Would ya'll fuck her?" and only one other player says yes. One player says, "My dad would kill me!" I don't say a word the whole time.
LA PLATA, MD
Fall 2017
La Plata High School
A boy on the opposing team says to us, "Y'all some big niggers, you know that?" He said this after we were kicking their ass all game. He didn't say it like it was supposed to hurt me, and honest, it didn't.
CINCINNATI, OH
Summer 2024
A woman walking opposite my girlfriend looks me up and down and loudly appraises me as a "Black Stallion". This woman was Black as well. It was much easier to laugh and laugh about this in the moment than it was later.
CHICAGO, IL
Spring 2024
m.henry
I'm walking into the diner, and an older white lady assumes, strangely, that my hair doesn't blow in the wind, and says as much to me.
SALISBURY, MD
Fall 2020 / Spring 2020
Commons
I'm eating breakfast, when a friend, a white friend, says, "It's like that one scene in The Boondocks where the white guy says, 'Can a nigga borrow a pencil,' and I say, 'What did you say?' and he says, quietly, 'Can a nigga borrow a pencil?' I only said it to you because I knew you wouldn't get upset."
Another time, I'm eating lunch with some other friends. This one kid, Chesley, is standing up acting a fool, and I said something to him, some kinda jab, something like "Chesley, stop acting like a..." I can't remember what. And he responds, quickly, and loud enough for the whole room to hear, it felt, "Xavo, stop acting like you're white!"
HEBRON, KY
Summer 2023
CVG
On my flight to D.C., a white woman in the aisle of the plane waits patiently for me to file in behind the Black person she's assumed I was flying with. We look at each other for an uncomfortable amount of time before she realizes my seat is further back and moves. She's so incredibly, incredibly embarrassed.
ARLINGTON, VA
1975
Supreme Court of Virginia
George Vollin Jr., perhaps around 60 years old, refused to lie down about it. He and 200 other "qualified voters of Arlington County" sign a petition, and bring that petition to the Supreme Court of Virginia. The goal of the petition is simple, to change the form of Arlington County government from the at-large system to a magisterial one. An at-large system means that the entire county votes for its representatives, as opposed to the magisterial, wherein each district can choose their own. The citizens of Black precincts are overridden by the overwhelming white majority. Their petition fails. George Vollin Jr. will never serve as sheriff of Arlington County. He will have worked as a post office messenger, a bricklayer, and chief of the East Arlington volunteer fire department. He will have even worked as personal assistant to the great general George C. Marshall—at his office in the Pentagon.
WASHINGTON DC
Summer 2025
Every summer I come home, and the first thing I want to do is drive the ten minutes from our current house in Upper Marlboro to Downtown Largo—the eastmost stop on the DC Metro. It's so exciting to me every time. It's the only place I've lived with any kind of robust public transportation. I just ride into the city at times with nothing to do, just to see what I can see.
I enjoy this, every time, and every time I'm struck with nostalgia, fondness, memory, and pride. Pride for my maternal grandfather, an engineer on the DC Metro, an engineer on the moon landing, and who, to my recent surprise, also designed the kiss and ride signs at all the stations. When I mention to him—with all this pride—that the DC Metro is rated as one of the best in the world, he is nonchalant, shrugs and says, "Oh, we only based it off what they were doing in Japan and London."
I'm struck too with memory, all my time spent riding back and forth to the city in the southeast where I got my haircut. Where my father got his hair cut since he was a kid. Where I still get mine when I'm home. Memories of the city sweltering in the summer, Smithsonian trips in the spring, when my family, all of us—my father, mother, sisters, grandparents, cousins—got together for Obama's inauguration. I remember how proud, how excited we were. How the only fight I ever got in was over politics at that time, how Derek wanted to hit me because I really wanted Obama to win, and said that John McCain would just die of old age anyway. How my friend cried when Obama was elected because they wanted to be the first Black president.
I remember the chaos of the inauguration, and the cold. The absolute throngs, how little me and my little cousins were, how little we could actually see. Us standing on the sidewalk in our big coats, under a little twiggy tree, me lying to my cousins and sisters, saying I was doing some ninja training—that I'd somehow figured out how to be immune to pain. How we got all lost and turned around in the streets we were supposed to know so well. I remember the chaos when this lady got thrown onto the tracks of the Metro. I can't remember now if she died or not. I don't think she did.
Of course now we're all grown up. I've been disenfranchised like I should. As I grew older, the ambient character of this country became more tactile, frightening, and maddening. It began to encroach more and more into my racial haven, to the point where it was impossible not to see. Or impossible to hide from. I was twelve when Trayvon Martin was killed and feeling fear, for the first time, wearing a hoodie around my neighborhood. I was fourteen when Eric Garner was killed. I learned all about Obama the war criminal. I was sixteen and cynical when Trump was elected the first time, my mother crying in the dark of the living room. I was in college when I felt I started to experience my own racism. Twenty when George Floyd was killed, making protest posters in the backyard with my friends.
It'd be easy for me to say that I hate this country. For years and years I did say it, and meant it too. But my pride doesn't have anywhere to go, I realize now—my anger can't destroy it. I still brag on my maternal grandfather. I still feel misty-eyed and sentimental when I'm tipsy on the train, riding under the city in the summer and in some way it's just him who's carrying me home. My feelings have nowhere to go. It's the opposite, really. The more I learn, the more I understand, the prouder I can be of my people, my parents and grandparents, this horrible country they helped to build. Teachers, doctors, engineers, first Black superintendents. It's pride in proportion to impossibility and brutal violence, violence I've mostly had to imagine.
I could consider myself lucky, I suppose, that my violence has been a different kind. Seeming less conscious, less targeted, more ignorant and insensitive, the feeling of incident—someone using that word they shouldn't use or making a weird joke about tanning. Getting treated like a sex object, sometimes. The echo of violence on the internet, of politics, confrontations which seem scattered, and distant. Or, I keep them scattered, and distant. Regardless, it's the present possibility of these confrontations which have us seeking out new worlds, new nations. In high school a few of us, burgeoning socialists, would scheme on getting out to one of those Scandinavian countries where the people are happy, and they've got paid vacation time, where there's no police state or mass deportation. But the dream of flight to Europe for the Black American, for me, is quashed by overwhelming alien whiteness. The dream of flight elsewhere, for me, at least, is quashed for lacking the American, which is Black, so it seems I'll stick it out.
CLEVELAND, OH
Summer 2024
Public Square
And of course there's the idea put forward simply by a friend I made while studying in Ohio. We're sitting in Cleveland's public square, smoking, looking up at the buildings glittering against black. She says, "Hell, if my ancestors died building it, I might as well enjoy it!"
DENVER, CO
Summer 2025
La Belle Rosette
And it could be as simple as that. If I let it, if I could. But I can't seem to extend my pride to myself, exactly, all those generations to make an artist. Me, sitting here, writing in this coffee shop while my friends are downtown getting tear-gassed at ICE protests. My hope is to be part of it, whatever resistance there is, whatever there is to be proud of now. With this writing, and my protesting too.
Maybe that's what it boils down to—to be involved, to be proud, acknowledged. To claim some stake somehow, to not be washed away entirely. In 2023 William Vollin attends the opening of the Queen City monument that I will discover two years later. At age 93 he was the sole representative of the former residents of Queen City. William says that despite being tough, he was quite tearful when he first saw it. "It symbolized that my grandma and those folks that ran Queen City will be remembered. Now she can look down and smile…Every time I pass by the Pentagon I remember my friends. I never saw many of them again: we were just scattered all over the place…It's been a sort of vindication, seeing this structure, that we'll not be forgotten..."
I'm not too sure, of course. Not sure how to bring about a Black National Consciousness or if that's even the end. Or if the end should be remembering one another, like William wanted, remembering our blood in our reading and writing, our shouting and talking. Or enjoying all of this, maybe, like my friend says, like the residents of Queen City were, in a happy, solid community. But if we try to be like them, if we try to be like Malcolm, like George, or William, will we face the same end? If we attempt any one thing could we accomplish the others in the process? Can we accomplish anything at all? I don't know. What I know is I can't be proud of something I hate, and I can't hate something for which I feel pride, so instead I'll want to love my country, something much more complicated than both. Like Baldwin said, "I love America more than any other country in the world...for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
I love all this, really, I'm trying. That's all I wanted to say.
