Press kit

Malik Carter’s father spent a lifetime building a fortress of silence against a world that left Black men no safe place for softness. When he dies, it comes crumbling down. It will take Malik years to fully understand what it held, and what it cost.

The truth, no longer hidden behind the wall of silence, left Malik suspended between selves, belonging fully to neither the face in the mirror nor the prestigious institutions where he modulates his voice, monitors his volume, and calculates every gesture. Since boyhood he has run the arithmetic of being seen as acceptable, and it has made him what his father was: credentialed, accomplished, a stranger in his own reflection.

The cruelest theft is not what a life of conformity takes from the body but what it persuades the mind to surrender willingly, one concession at a time, for the safety of being tolerated.

What saves him is not arrival. It is something that those who came before left for him, never named, never spoken aloud—and the question of what he will leave behind.

Tavares Brewington lives and works in Boston. Brewington holds a JD from Boston College Law School and an MBA from Cornell University. The Reflection That Love Left is Brewington’s first novel.