How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(38)

Set goals, write visions, dream big, and know that all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord. Never allow bitter people to make you bitter. Haters will hate. The man of courage is not the man who did not face adversity. The man of courage is the man who faced adversity and spoke to it. The man of courage tells adversity, “You’re trespassing and I give you no authority to steal my joy, my faith, or my hope.”

Ten seconds is too long to dwell on the negative. After nine seconds, cast your cares toward heaven and ask God to take your problems and you keep on pressing.





Psalm 91


You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday.

This scripture has carried me through the most difficult seasons of my life. I hope it will bless you on your travels in life. I love you and thank God for you. It is my prayer that the blessings of God will overtake you in all of your endeavors as you allow God to order your steps. Remember, no matter what, God expects teachers to teach and learn every day of their lives. You have no choice. Reach out to your mama. She needs to hear your voice.

Love always,

Aunt Sue


DEAR MAMA,

When you pulled that gun on me at nineteen, I knew that it was because American life was eating you up from the inside, and you wanted me to live. Five years after getting kicked out of school, I was offered a teaching job at Vassar College. As Aunt Sue has said thousands of times, “The devil is a liar.”

After a fourteen-hour drive from Bloomington, Indiana, I drove directly to the main gates of Vassar College and instead of going through what I knew would be the hassle of security, I thought about what you would want me to do. I turned around and found my way to Alumnae House, the college hotel.

Alumnae House was the first hotel I’d ever been in that had no televisions in the room. What Alumnae House lacked in televisions, it made up for in spooky pictures of little beady-eyed white children. All through Alumnae House, I found myself being looked at by the hollow gazes of little Brody, Chad, and Hannah.

I called Grandma from the room and told her that Vassar didn’t feel like home, that I didn’t like the way the little white kids were looking at me, and that I didn’t like how Vassar looked like a guarded castle. Grandma said that Northern rich white folks loved to put ghost-looking pictures of white children on the walls and that I didn’t drive fourteen hours to “…find no home or judge no white folks’ pictures. You have a home,” she told me. “You up there to get a job. Those white folks are lucky to have you applying for that job. But it’s still a blessing. So get that blessing, create blessings for yourself and our people, and don’t get caught up in no mess.”

I got that blessing, Mama, and I also got caught up in the kind of mess that would need at least two hundred more pages to explore.

When I was twenty-five, you told me to confront failure and mediocrity with honesty, humility, and imaginative will, and to show a little more restraint with my anger since I had students of my own who would look to me as a model.

I’m still working on that.

In and out of the classroom, my kids have asked hard questions, and risked intellectual and emotional shame and fatigue. After graduating, some led renewal efforts in New Orleans; some graduated from law school; a few became producers; tons have gone on to seek MFAs and PhDs; plenty have become journalists; others are doing the colossal (and colossally underpaid) work of teaching middle school and high school. But more than anything, they’re creating generative work in the world and being honest about their joys and failures. They are doing their jobs to make a crazy-making nation less crazy-making and more morally just.

I get why teachers get tired, Mama. I get why teachers punish themselves. But I also get how the students fuel us, teach us, keep us committed to life. Any supposed success I’ve had since I left home has been because of the prayers of my family, my memories of home, my imagination, and mostly my students. Of course, some of my students are trifling as hell, but most have accepted that they would not have the choices they have, or sturdy moral centers, were it not for the committed students who came before them. This is what you taught me. This is what I’m trying to teach my students. This is what my students teach each other.

Last week, I got an email, a tweet, and phone call from my favorite emcee, my favorite writer, and my favorite academic. It felt so good, Mama, to know that I somehow managed to live long enough to inspire folks who have spent a lifetime inspiring me. But that truth was cotton candy compared to the joy of watching Cordelia and Ocasio ask some of their one-of-a-kind questions, or Alitasha patiently breaking down the rituals of Easter at Coney Island in her thesis, or Sharon sitting in the president’s conference room telling a roundtable of mostly white folks that black and brown women of color deserve more care and honesty from the institution.

I get why you teach, Mama. And I get that the love you have for your students and that your students have for you is one of the most lasting loves in the world. I didn’t understand that as a child. And I hated that you were rarely home, and how we had more books than bill money, but now I get it. You had one child, but you had hundreds of students with thousands of pounds of passion. You were changing the world, and allowing yourself to be changed and loved, one student at a time.

I love you, Mama. My insides bruise easily and I’m prone to addictive tendencies when my heart hurts, just like you. I have looked fleshy, complicated love in the face and convinced myself I wasn’t worthy of love or loving. I have lied. I have cheated. I have failed and I have maimed myself and others close to me. But I believe in transformation, and for the first time in my life, I really get how transformation is impossible without honest acceptance of who you are, whence you came, what you do in the dark, and how you want to love and be loved tomorrow. Baldwin wrote years ago that the only real change is a moral change.