In Heads of the Colored People, an intricate, playful debut short story collection from Nafissa Thompson-Spires, we are able to observe some answers. ‘How do we,’ she dares, ‘divest ourselves of the need to make ourselves extraordinary?’ Collins was speaking as much about black lives as she was about black fiction. And although she would be dead four years later – losing her life to cancer at the age of 46 – one of the questions she poses to her black students continues to reverberate. She emits warmth as well as deep seriousness. In the footage, filmed in 1984 at Howard University, Collins is magnetic. Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (posthumously published in 2017). Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Heads of the Colored People’
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