High Country News

Lezley Saar’s ‘Diorama Drama’ and me

SEPTEMBER 2017. I didn’t know where I was going to live.

I’d been surviving rent-free as a “granny nanny” in Orange County, California, for three years, living on $600 under-the-table per month. The agreed-upon term was over, and I was beginning to hope for a future sans caregiving.

With the help of paper-and-book artist Jill Littlewood, I was building an anti-lynching website to call attention to historical and modern-day racist terrorism. I planned to use Paypal Credit for a long-overdue trip to visit my 80-something mother in Seattle. I had been reading about a 70-something-year-old Black woman, an unhoused

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