Namwali Serpell

It's so – yeah, it's heartbreaking.

I think one of the incidents that had happened more recently – you know, police brutality happens all the time.

But the playbill of Dreaming Emmett had as a kind of little piece of – it's just a little piece of information.

It points out that the play was partly inspired by the death of Michael Stewart.

who is a young black man who was arrested for writing graffiti at the First Avenue subway station.

And he had been arrested by New York City Transit Police.

He was beaten.

He was unconscious.

His wrists were bound to his ankles.

And there were signs that he had been strangled.

And he died.

And this had just happened in New York.

Morson was living in Albany while she was teaching there, but it happened in New York where she was living most of the time.

And so there's this recent thing that had just happened that made her think about Emmett Till again because she had already been thinking about Emmett Till in writing Song of Solomon.

So it came back to her.

It haunted her.

The other thing that inspired her was she was in an airport and she saw two little black boys just walking through the airport but just like playfully, like playing with each other.

And immediately what flashed through her head was what if one of them got shot right now?

And I found that very eerie because I had not read that interview with Morrison about Dreaming Emmett.

Before I wrote my novel, The Furrows, but I have an incident in which a young black man gets tased in an airport in that novel.