Page 17 - The Culture Report Issue #2

The Culture Report

Black Girl Magic Feature

The Cheesecake Sisters

Jaqi Wright and her mother couldn’t get enough of her sister’s cheesecake.

The two of them, relaxing on New Year’s Day, savored two slices each while sipping coffee.

“You really can sell these,'” Wright recalls her mother saying.
“And that’s when I sat up straight,” Wright says.

Wright and her sister, Nikki Howard, are

furloughed federal employees who have found

themselves without work and a paycheck since
the partial government shutdown began Dec.

22. Like some of the 800,000 federal

employees and contractors who are without
pay during the 26-day shutdown, Wright and

Howard — who work for the Justice

Department and Food and Drug Administration

in Washington D.C., respectively — are worried about how the lack of pay will impact their finances.

So the Maryland-based sisters decided to follow their mother’s advice. They launched The Furlough

Cheesecake on New Year’s Day and are now selling cheesecakes for $29.98 each.

“We don’t know when this is going to end. We don’t have a clue,” Howard, the baker behind the

operation, says. “But instead of dwelling on that and feeling the depression that tends to come with

these kinds of situations, we’re making a decision to do something else.”

ANB House of Royalty Publication