by Tracey Michae’l


I remember when I first encountered the side-eye. I was probably about six or seven and watching a "conversation" between my mother and a cashier at the A&P who tried it with her about a coupon. It was a thing of beauty, this way of cutting without knives. This way of making a point and putting folks in their place with only a brief, chastising look. And my mother, well, she is the Master Po of the art: a chief side-eye slinger who spent many years teaching her little grasshopper the ways of the craft.