In your life, if you’re lucky enough, you are born during a moment in time when the world is ready for the change you’re bringing.
Some people don’t believe that you can meet a person and know that’s the person for you for the rest of your life. I’m not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know.
But I don’t want to read faster or older or any way else that might make the story disappear too quickly from where it’s settling inside my brain, slowly becoming a part of me. A story I will remember long after I’ve read it for the second, third, tenth, hundredth time.
Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don’t always do or say what a writer wishes.
When there are many worlds you can choose the one you walk into each day.
This is the way brown people have to fight, my grandfather says. You can’t just put your fist up. You have to insist on something gently. Walk toward a thing slowly. But be ready to die, my grandfather says, for what is right. Be ready to die, my grandfather says, for everything you believe in.
My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.
I am born as the South explodes, too many people too many years enslaved, then emancipated but not free, the people who look like me keep fighting and marching and getting killed so that today – February 12, 1963 and every day from this moment on, brown children like me can grow up free. Can grow up learning and voting and walking and riding wherever we want. I am born in Ohio but the stories of South Carolina already run like rivers through my veins.
Somewhere in my brain each laugh, tear and lullaby becomes memory.
For a long time, my mother’s wasn’t dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given in to the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves – or worse, in the care of New York City Children’s Services, where, my father said, there was seldom a happy ending. But this didn’t happen. I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.
No past. No future. Just this perfect Now.
Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow. – Langston Hughes.
Tragedy is strange. It takes away. And it gives too” -Haley.
Back then, we still all believed in happy endings. None of us knew yet how many endings and beginnings one story could have.
Age will do that to you. Soon as something starts coming to your mind, it snatches it back. Makes you forget the stuff you want to remember. Brings back the memories you’re busy trying to forget.
First they brought us here. Then we worked for free. Then it was 1863, and we were supposed to be free but we weren’t. And that’s why people are so mad.
I didn’t know it would be people you barely knew becoming friends that harbored you. And dreams you didn’t even know you had – coming true. I didn’t know it would be superpowers rising up out of tragedies, and perfect moments in a nearly empty classroom.
The empty swing set reminds us of this – that what is bad won’t be bad forever, and what is good can sometimes last a long, long time.
Letters becoming words, words gathering meaning, becoming thoughts outside my head becoming sentences written by Jacqueline Amanda Woodson.
Even the silence has a story to tell you. Just listen. Listen.