In light of recent events involving the magazine, I am loath to quote Rolling Stone. And yet, for my purposes, the words of reviewer Rob Sheffield sum up quite succinctly what occurred this time last year, in December of 2013:

Beyoncé has delivered countless surprises in her 15 years on top of the music world, but she’s never dropped a bombshell like this. The Queen Bey woke the world in the midnight hour with a surprise “visual album” – 14 new songs, 17 videos, dropped via iTunes with no warning. The whole project is a celebration of the Beyoncé Philosophy, which basically boils down to the fact that Beyoncé can do anything the hell she wants to.

This was what I woke up to on December 13, 2013 as I signed into Twitter:

Beyoncé‘s surprise release of her fifth studio album…has been referred to in at least 1.2 million tweets, a Twitter spokesperson told Mashable. The stunt, at its peak on Twitter, sparked more than 5,300 tweets per minute.

Understand that at the time, I was not a Beyoncé fan in the traditional, hysterically-mad-with-joy sense. My online world, where I conduct much of my creative work, networking, and general foolishness (i.e., my tweets), was beset by the so-called “BeyHive.” All of my fellow tweeters, many of them writers and artists themselves, pressed the proverbial pause button on their self-promotion or general discussions around, say, the need for diversity in books, and the publishing world in whole, to participate in the conversation.

On a Saturday morning in September, 2010, my younger brother Austin took out a handgun I hadn’t known he owned, told his wife to call the police, and gave her a special password with which to identify him. “They’re coming for me,” he said, “but I’ll keep you safe.”

At least, that’s the story his wife told us at the time. From there, details get a bit hazy, but the facts are these: my brother brandished a firearm. He was delusional—the password was invented, as was the threat he believed imminent—due to a combination of narcotics abuse and undiagnosed mental illness. The police arrived at his middle-class home in a Birmingham, Alabama, suburb. My brother was eventually disarmed and transported to a local hospital’s psychiatric ward. No one was harmed, a fact my sister and I celebrated later. “Thank God he didn’t hurt anyone,” I said when she called me that afternoon, never once worrying that it might have been my brother who was hurt.

Here’s another fact, one that I have come to believe determined how the morning’s events unfolded: my brother was white.

***

It was a hot, windy day when we addressed Rosa Herrsch’s Facebook posts at our weekly board meeting. This was in early summer, when in evening the part of the sky that faced the Holy Land grew purple, and the mockingbirds seemed to echo our pain, and we in turn echoed theirs.

“On Facebook, every damn hour she’s cursing the Holy Land. Rosa–and such a sweet woman!” said Moshe, who had recently joined Facebook, newly a widower.

“Yes, Moshe. I’m not on Facebook, but some of my friends have shared this with me–it’s concerning, to put it lightly,” said Lucas, the writer and columnist for his high school paper. He pushed his little round glasses up the bridge of his nose, then pursed his lips wisely, a boy beyond his years.

(1973) Do we fear demons? Or do we fear mere possession? Remember those scenes in The Exorcist? Demon girl creeping down the staircase like a spider; demon girl’s head spinning like a top; demon girl announcing death to all, then peeing on the floor? Demon girl clearly out of control. Demon girl is (gasp) prepubescent, premenstrual, hormonal! The patriarchy is powerless and must ascribe demon girl demonically possessed. But is she? What’s the cultural message? (The patriarchy made me do it?) The social consciousness’ fear of burgeoning womanhood? Women on the verge, girls with urges, hormonal surges and sex splurges? It is the horror of the whore, the female body in revolt, boy-toy exploits?

I was eight when my altruistic and socially conscious parents took in fifteen-year-old foster “child” Jerry. It was the winter of 1973 and the film The Exorcist had recently been released. My parents, avid cinemaphiles, had gone to see it, only my mother — probably due to her having been anointed at an early age in Catholicism, a byproduct of her colonialized, reservation school upbringing — spent most of movie’s length in the lobby smoking cigarettes and waiting for it to be over. She slept for weeks after with the lights on. Our new foster “child” Jerry boasted about having seen the movie — boasted because he wouldn’t have been old enough to get admitted — and one of his favorite ways to amuse and impress my sister and myself was to detail particulars of especially gruesome scenes as if describing the aftermath of a car accident. He recounted the horrors blow by blow. Vividly. He also laid the groundwork for monumental pranks. One of them involved rigging my mother’s dresser with strings and wires to slam the bedroom door shut after she entered the room. Another involved me lying in bed spitting pea soup and speaking some approximation of Latin or Tongues. These never panned out, but he did manage to get enough of his shit together to paint The Exorcist in red paint across the side of the backyard playhouse.