Published in Issue 63.3: Summer 2024
Vince Omni is the 2024 winner of MQR‘s Jesmyn Ward Prize in Fiction for the piece “The Diaspora Café” which is published in the Summer 2024 issue of MQR. The Michigan Quarterly Review established this prize in 2021 in honor of Helen Zell Writers’ Program alumna Jesmyn Ward, who served as the prize’s inaugural judge. You can purchase our Summer issue here.
Why We Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Kelly Plante on why she recommended “The Diaspora Café” by Vince Omni for the Jesmyn Ward Prize in Fiction.
Vince Omni’s “The Diaspora Café” takes place in and around the titular café, formerly Pops’ Diner. It’s operated after Pops’ death by his daughter Chidi in the historically Black, currently gentrifying, Five Points neighborhood in Denver. As the daughter of a “1964 Golden Gloves champ and beloved man of the people” who hung a map of the Middle Passage in his diner, and “an Igbo woman who fled Nigeria in the wake of the civil war” and emphasized that “the history of black people does not begin with slavery,” Chidi attempts to reconcile her parental legacies with her position in her local community.
While “Chidi never understood her father’s attachment to the map,” her service in the U.S. Army “had taught her a painful lesson about historical memory”: a lesson she must now apply to the “social media melee” in which she finds herself when deciding whether to sell the café to a chain called Super Nova. Selling would allow her to relocate the Diaspora in another neighborhood—but would leave just three Black-owned legacy businesses in Five Points. Omni’s story asks, how does one ethically balance familial and communal, even historical, duty? Is it worth “making money off white interlopers” if they threaten to engulf the culture via a capitalistic supernova?
As these pivotal questions power the narrative, so, too, do textured, sensory immersions into (and preservations of) African and African American dance, music, smells, tastes, and family memories. Omni satisfyingly structures the story across one workweek of five daily specials. Starting with “Monday’s Special: The Malcolm X Burger, A black bean and quinoa patty on a toasted gluten-free bun with tomatoes, sprouts, and spicy aioli,” readers meet “Flag Man,” who dances and distributes tiny American flags. Chidi can’t quite remember how she knows him. By Friday’s Special, “The Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Southern-fried chicken over a buttermilk waffle,” Flag Man is revealed as Stanley, a fellow veteran, who leads a protest (or dance, or celebration, or all of the above) across the street from the Diaspora, with Chidi pulled along.
Omni weaves sensory experience onto a map charting past and present, local and global forces. The implications, and complications, of characters’ choices create a story worth reading—and re-reading many times over—to let the transatlantic tastes wash over you. Come and reckon with your own place in this expertly drawn and choreographed map, protest, and dance that is “The Diaspora Café.”
Monday’s Special: The Malcolm X Burger
A black bean and quinoa patty on a toasted gluten-free bun with tomatoes, sprouts, and spicy aioli. Served with roasted sweet potatoes.
Chidi knows Flag Man—she just can’t place him. From where she stands in the kitchen making two specials, she watches Marshawn pour him a large dark roast, bag up an old-fashioned donut, and slide them across the glass counter. Flag Man snaps to attention and salutes Marshawn, ashy brown fingers angled against the Denver Broncos logo stitched to his orange and blue skull cap. He exits through the front door that opens onto Welton Street. Two American flags flutter from the back pocket of his tattered jeans like a mini parade. Chidi resists the urge to salute. That instinct, born from twenty years in the Army, is hard to suppress, but the black bean burgers help. Now plated, they nestle along the curve of one arm. She can feel their warmth as she watches Flag Man. Each step he takes is precise, the walk of a soldier. He huffs and a wispy cloud evaporates into the afternoon chill. Sunlight catches the chrome of bulky, tape-bound headphones clamped down over his ears. A glimmer, a blink of the eye, and he is lost amid a crowd of holiday shoppers.
The billboard over the old Ace Hardware across the street has been there since Thanksgiving, white letters popping against a light blue background. Start your day like a superstar! Super Nova Beans and Brew! Coming in 2016! Chidi knows this is not for sure true. Super Nova still needs to survive the city council vote next Monday. Some people in Five Points don’t want the retail chain to absorb the Diaspora Café. Last weekend a customer told Chidi she shouldn’t do business with Super Nova because the CEO is a member of the illuminati. There are more pressing concerns, of course: the unfair tax incentives Super Nova is likely to receive; a spike in housing costs that follows the chain wherever it operates; and a surge in traffic that’s likely to drive parking spots, those ever-elusive urban commodities to the brink of extinction. Not that Chidi will have to worry about parking. A yes vote means she can sign the contract on her desk. A stroke of the pen, and just like that, she’ll be rich. With more than enough money for her and Nico, her husband and junior partner, to set up the Diaspora in another part of Denver, in another city altogether, if that’s what they want. They could retire, buy that RV they sometimes talk about, hit the road for a grand adventure. Or tour Africa. She’s only been to Enugu, her mother’s home in Nigeria, and Africa’s mega cities—Lagos, Cairo, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam—call to her.
A flyer taped to the door catches Chidi’s eye. It features the café’s logo, a map of the Black Atlantic stamped onto a coffee cup sandwiched by the word DIASPORA on top and CAFÉ on the bottom. A message printed in large bold font on the flyer announces, The Black-Coffee-Matters Rally, 10 a.m. Saturday outside the Diaspora Café. A vote against Super Nova is a vote for Five Points! Brought to you by the Real Five Points Coalition.
“Fucking DeAndra,” Chidi mutters. She rips the flyer from the door and surveys the café for DeAndra James, head of the Real Five Points Coalition and Marshawn’s older sister. All she finds are regulars: employees from the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library across the street, undergrads with MacBooks, and a few remaining locals from when her father used to run the joint. A lot of white people. More than would have been here twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. Two of them will be eating cold black bean burgers if she doesn’t get moving. She stuffs the flyer into her apron pocket and strides over to a table where a couple sips half-finished lattes. She eases the plates down before them, collects the table marker—a tiny Kenyan flag affixed to a metal stand. She deposits the flag near the register amid dozens of others: Jamaican, Canadian, Nigerian, British, Brazilian. American. Nico, tall and light-skinned with locks that cascade down broad shoulders, stocks the shelves. She taps one of those shoulders. “Got a minute?”
He dumps squat brown packages labeled with Direct Trade stickers into a wicker basket and follows her into the kitchen, where Chidi asks the dishwasher to relieve Marshawn. “I need to see her now.”
“What’s up?” Nico asks.
Chidi hands him the flyer. The way his face relaxes when he reads, all pretense slipping away from his expression as his lips move, is one of the first thing she admired about Nico when she met him six years ago while on leave in Savannah, Georgia. He sat outside a crowded café reading Devil in the Blue Dress and sipping a doppio, like that moment was the most important moment in his life, like he’d been born to read that book and sip espresso without a care in the world. She asked to share his table and he smiled. Only if you tell me your name. Three months later, they jumped the broom in front of the Haitian Monument at Franklin Square. Nat and Olanma, Chidi’s parents, and Ike, her older brother, flew down from Denver for the wedding. It had been a good day for her father. A third round of chemo for prostate cancer had gone well. His PSAs were down, and his spirits were up. He welcomed Nico to the family with a hug and clap on the back. Call me Pops! They got on like a house on fire. Both men were oddly handsome, artistic, charismatic. No head for business, either. Nat Creek, aka Pops, 1964 Golden Gloves champ and beloved man of the people. Never charged to rent his diner for special events. Gave food to anyone with a sad song. Nico, the perpetual artist, was ever content to create but never profit. When Chidi used to stay in his Savannah home, she found recipes sticking from books and index card containers, handmade furniture crammed to the rafters in his workshop, forgotten drafts of short stories on his desk.
“We can’t afford this kind of attention,” Chidi says now to Nico. “Super Nova’ll walk away from this deal if they get more bad press. You saw what happened in Portland.” A white manager calling the cops on two black college students happened in Portland. An econ major who, though he could not always afford to buy coffee, always arrived early to secure a highly sought-after table near the window, was arrested for loitering. Super Nova issued a tepid apology that did little to appease a cascade of nationwide criticism.
“Let them walk!” Nico hands the notice back to Chidi. “Pops wouldn’t want this.”
“We barely turned a profit this year!”
“It takes five years to see a profit. We did it in one!”
Duty, her North Star, led Chidi back to Denver when her father died two years ago. She hadn’t meant to stay, had no interest in the diner. It had been too small a place to hold her and her father at the same time, so it was the Army for her. She enlisted the morning she turned eighteen and told her father about it while closing the diner that night. He hit the ceiling, said a black soldier in America was an oxymoron. So is a business that keeps losing money. They were the only words she could think to wound him, to get him off her back. With him gone, she thought it might be different, but she still felt claustrophobic there, with the second mortgage, the failing HVAC system, the cracked vinyl seats she and Ike stacked on chipped Formica tables each night so they could sweep and mop the gold linoleum that curled up in the corners. And memories of Nat everywhere: in the large 24-quart pots he labored over each day, in the old map of the Middle Passage their father hung behind the desk in his office. Ola, her mother, an Igbo woman who fled Nigeria in the wake of civil war, had taught her that the history of black people does not begin with slavery. Chidi never understood her father’s attachment to the map, couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be reminded of that history. By the time he died that had changed, as the Army had taught her a painful lesson about historical memory. Still, she wanted no part in the diner until Nico, that fount of creative energy, pitched an idea. What if we used our savings to turn it into a café? Hang Pops’ map out front and build a Black Atlantic motif around it? Chidi fell for the possibility of making money off white interlopers. Nico called it The Diaspora Café.
Now customers pay top dollar for collard green omelets, cornmeal porridge, fried eggs and dodo. Her father’s beloved chili, a steadfast staple apparently too quotidian for hipsters, does not move as well. It might sell better if they paired it with Pabst Blue Ribbon, but they’re still waiting on a liquor license from the city. A few of the old regulars who haven’t been pushed out to Aurora or Green Valley Ranch still order chili to go, carting away steaming cardboard containers in fancy paper bags bearing the café’s logo. Chidi wants to scratch it from their production line, but Nico, whose hold on the menu is authoritarian, won’t let her.
Marshawn sashays into the kitchen. “Hey, Nico,” she says, voice sweet and gooey.
Chidi sticks the flyer in Marshawn’s face. “You know about this?”
“Damn!” Marshawn rears back. “Why you comin’ for me?” She takes the paper from Chidi, reads it closely, smiles.
Chidi edges forward and speaks through clenched teeth. “Did you know about this?”
“Hell naw!” Marshawn shifts her weight onto one foot. “Ain’t like I’m sad about it, though.” Marshawn used to sit in the dining room, hands filled with pencils or charcoal, head bent over a sketchbook. A ninth grader when Pops offered her a job at the register, she’s now in her second year of art school.
Nico crosses his arms and does that thing with his eyebrow that reminds Chidi of The Rock. Marshawn examines her fingernails: blue with red streaks, like her braids. Chidi reminds herself to breathe. She’s felt this way more and more of late, as if Nat is still there, his booming personality crowding the room.
“The Real Five Points Coalition,” Chidi says. “That’s your sister, right? DeAndra?”
“So?” Marshawn shrugs.
“So don’t stand there and tell me you didn’t know about this.”
“See?” Marshawn says, untying her apron. “You just like these white folks around here.”
The way Chidi advances on Marshawn is reflexive. The Army taught her that, too.
“Easy, babe.” Nico steps between the two women.
Marshawn slides the apron over her head. “You think your name and that nappy-ass hair make you black when really you walk around here in yoga pants, ready to sell out the first chance you get.” She storms out of the kitchen, around the counter and into the heart of the café. “And take that goddamn map off the wall. Don’t nobody wanna see that!”
You can read Omni’s full Ward prize-winning story in our Summer 2024 issue. Purchase our Summer 2024 issue, available in print and digital forms, here.
Vince Omni is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He holds an MFA from the University of Kansas, where he worked in the History of Black Writing (HBW) research center. He is a winner of the Margaret Walker Memorial Prize in Fiction, a Hurston/Wright Fellow, a Kimbilio Fellow, and co-founder of SoulClap: A Black Joy Journal. His story “Mine Own” will be published in Virgin Islands Noir (Akashic, forthcoming).
