L.A. woman
Today: Myriam Gurba, founding editor of Tasteful Rude, and author of Creep, Mean, and Poppy State.
Issue No. 515
I’m From the Concrete: A Conversation with Keeonna Harris
Myriam Gurba
I’m From the Concrete: A Conversation with Keeonna Harris
by Myriam Gurba
Keeonna Harris has always dreamt big. When she was fourteen, the high school freshman plotted a future inspired by The Cosby Show: after graduating from high school, she would leave Los Angeles and go to Spelman, a historically Black, women’s liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia. Next, she’d breeze through medical school, marry the Morehouse man of her dreams, and become an obstetrician. Jason, a sixteen-year-old drug dealer with long lashes and hazel eyes, torched these plans. Harris quickly fell in love with the tattooed gang member, and to show him that she loved him, she had sex with him. “Why not?” she thought. Like so many kids, Harris thought she couldn’t get pregnant from her first time. The birth of her son Tre proved otherwise, and the struggles that Harris faced in the ensuing decades are detailed in her memoir Mainline Mama.
Criminalization carves the book’s terrain. Harris guides readers through California’s carceral system, showing us what it means to be a mainline mama, a Black woman “with a relationship to prisons—through visitation or incarceration—who engages with family, children, partners, and other women.” Harris’s cinematic storytelling is wondrous, and her work offers a blueprint for women committed to revolutionary motherhood.
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