Posts by Sameer Hussain

To crack the shell, I did what I always do — held one egg steady in my left hand and struck it with the second egg in my right. But the one that cracked wasn’t always the one doing the striking. Sometimes the egg I held still was the one that gave way. Other times, the one swinging in was the one that split. And I stood at my counter in the quiet of the morning, staring at the un-cracked egg in my palm, thinking: which one was supposed to break?

I was born in 1967 in Aurora, Illinois — the daughter of two Black parents who had migrated north during the Civil Righ...