This episode talks about Vell's challenges with love and support from family & friends.

The Good Read for this episode is Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition] by Richard Wright, John Edgar Wideman (Foreword by), Malcolm Wright (Afterword). Wright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and Blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he headed north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.”

What's Popping in Vell's World consist of Kyle Rittenhouse & Ahmaud Arbery verdict, BMF season finale, Power Book Season 2 premiere, RIP Luh Rob, and more.

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