In December 1962, when James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew” was published, my grandmother was at the tail end of her years of bearing children, though still in the throes of raising them. They lived in the “Magic City,” Birmingham, Alabama. In a few weeks’ time, Birmingham’s children would capture the attention of the nation for fighting segregation—they streamed out of schools, sang behind bars, fell and stood up again as police dogs ripped at them, toppled from the force of water cannons. Malcolm X would deride black Alabama’s adults for allowing their children to be in the line of fire. But Baldwin admired them. I have a photo of him with Bayard Rustin on my office door. They hold a sign that reads “Birmingham’s children.”
Baldwin loved children. But more than that, he cherished the minds and capacities of young people. It was a trait he shared with my grandmother, yet their lives could have hardly been more different. Though they stood in the same generation and on the same side of the American color line, Neida Mae Garner Perry was a woman with rural origins. James Arthur Baldwin was urban and urbane. He was a Leo and she was a Libra, both characteristically so. She was domestic, a raiser of children, and he was peripatetic, a knight confronting history.
The lesson of “A Letter to My Nephew,” however, was about the future and the past at once. In it, Baldwin cautions his nephew about coming of age in the heat of white supremacy. But he also guides the youth to understand from whence he comes; to treat his genealogy, his father, gently. I, like so many others who were profoundly shaped by that essay in youth, have taken seriously its charge of tending to the fact of the lives that bore mine with care.
It is so difficult to witness the pain of those that raised you. It is worse to imagine them reliving it.
When Donald Trump was elected President, I seethed. I found myself saying angrily to anyone who would listen that my mother had grown up in the white nationalist order of “Bombingham,” Alabama, and I was enraged that she had to live through its rebirth. That is how personal this assault has felt. Like a target directed at all of our mothers’ suffering, their endurance, and their great gift to the nation: allowing America to creep out of its deep hypocrisy and ugly shame.
I couldn’t even begin to think about what it would have meant for my grandmother to witness the 2016 election. She would have called him lowdown, because he is. She would have commented on the legions of lowdown people who voted for him, because they were too.
Once upon a time, in 2008, we were all wistful that our grandmother didn’t live to see a black man become President. I mean “our grandmother” in the collective sense. All of our departed really. In my last visit to my own before she died, she asked me, disoriented yet steady, “Is it voting day?” Skeptical of my answer—“No”—she asked to see the paper. I handed it to her and wiped blood from the corner of her mouth. She, a woman who read every day, let the paper rest, unread. Imagine if this woman who couldn’t exercise the right until she was forty-eight years old, a woman who cherished every instance of civic participation, had lived to see a black man as President. I would have loved to look into her eyes.
My grandmother was a small woman. Steely, smooth-faced with barely a wrinkle even when her skin fell slack in old age. She lived through a world that changed thoroughly. She raised children to face the dawning sun in the mornings. The light shone through yellow curtains onto our heads at her kitchen table each morning. Every one of us took our turn in the same metal highchair, drank in the same sun and hot breakfast, and made our way through the history of the twentieth century.
She died, and too soon it seems the curtain fell.
In the year my grandmother was born, at least three black men were lynched in Alabama: Poe Hibbler Pickens, and Sam and William Powell Lowndes. In the year she gave birth to her first child, another named Jesse Thornton was murdered in Luverne, Alabama.
In 2018, I responded cynically at the passing of antilynching legislation. What kind of stunt is this? I thought. Too late. Of course, racist vigilantism isn’t over. Danye Jones, son of Ferguson activist Melissa McKinnies, was found hanging by a bedsheet in October 2018 in his mother’s yard. And who can forget the stories of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, children whose lives were taken by angry, violent men. But the technology of the racist death machine has changed. It has grown beyond something that can be treated with a legislative response. In America, there is an infrastructure of racial violence that can be executed with no spectacle, while keeping the killer’s hands unstained. It comes with the official sanction of the police power and the sanctioned judgment of the courts and government agencies and schools and housing authorities.
I have not yet gone to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, but I admit I will have to prepare myself for the fact that it is a living, yawning memorial: to lynching, to prison, to subjugation.
I am just old enough to have learned the story of John Henry organically. I can sing it from the top of my head. “John Henry said to his captain, a man is nothing but a man. But before I let this steam drill beat me down, I’ll die with the hammer in my hand.”
John Henry is a folk hero. He might have been a real man, and he might have worked on the railroad in Alabama. Some say Virginia. Some say elsewhere. He is a myth even if he was once a man. John Henry had a folk literature written about him; a laborer cherished for his brawn, he was the best steel driver ever seen. He hammered into rock. And when the power drill came, making him and his peers obsolete, he competed with the technology. Man against drill. John Henry died in a competition with mechanization, and he tragically won.
You might think steel driving was merely brute force, work that was repetitive and mindless. But in fact, the work of a steel driver is more complicated. To hammer the steel into the hold requires something much more than muscle memory. The wind that day, the tightness of muscles, the tiredness of the body, the place you clutch the hammer, literally dozens of variables in each instance, all mean that each strike must be different if one is to hit the right spot. The driver learns to modify the body mid-strike to meet the goal of driving the steel.
In America, there is an infrastructure of racial violence that can be executed with no spectacle, while keeping the killer's hands unstained.
John Henry died for that goal.
Democracy is not an end. It is a process, a virtuous one when pursued in earnest decency. Politics, however, is a goal-driven exercise. Our politics so often distort to meet their goal, and the goal, I am sorry to realize, is to hammer us into the ground. Or to work them to death. I say it that way because I am both black and American. The sorry consequence is that freedom dreamers are caught in a Sisyphean choreography, seeking something better only to be thwarted again and again in the passion of freedom.
This last strike feels like too much.
My grandmother migrated, like so many others, from the rural South to the urban South. To a steel mill town. It was a place of new prosperity for black folks who worked in the mills. That is until black lung disease ate away at them from the inside out, and the work became obsolete.
And so it goes, down the hill again.
Neida Mae Garner Perry was not an idealist, but she was a striver and a woman of impeccable dignity. She witnessed change. She cherished civic participation. She belonged to the process. She saw when things got better. But she was also a woman who carried the memory of when four girls, age peers with her daughters, a few miles away from the house in Magic City were bombed to death.
I cannot lie, it feels as though the things that got better have gotten bad again. I don’t think she would be surprised. We are in a time warp, where past and present structures of racism collide. New good things happen, old tragedies return. It is dizzying, beating back the past, deconstructing the present, finding hopes dashed, and battles won; we suffer from nightly massacres, and are constantly being told that it is really working white men who are the ones hurting. We are to pay for all of their hurt and pride. Again.
Everyone in my family holds their back ramrod straight, because of generations of defiance. But the weight on my shoulders feels great. I live with a daily headache. It is not the crown of a noble history that beats against my skull. It is the chains holding my wrists. And yet, I’m pulled beyond the fact of my body and genealogy. Another thing my grandmother shared with James Baldwin: She had an uncanny ability to empathize with lives different than her own. Love made her do that.
Because I learned from her example that there is no meritocracy in this life, and also that hoarding is never a virtuous way to be, I know it is nothing but an accident that puts my children safe in bed while another is dying in a fitful feverish thrashing after running from violence in Central America. Fugitives are captured and tortured, children are stolen from parents and caged. It is literally a repetition of my history. It is literally a repetition of our present. Have you seen the complexion of a juvenile detention facility? Black like a plantation.
I mumble shamefully each night when I speak my gratitude to the ancestors. They endured so much. And I mean all of them, of whatever origin, because the truth is that most of us have more ancestors who were the disenfranchised than ones who were served by abundance. We have failed them. I meet with a friend and she tells me, but this is not our shame! And she is right, this is not our shame.
It’s funny, no matter how many centuries have been devoted to crafting the official story that black people are shameful, we have been the grace note of American history. And yet if I am honest, shame is what I feel. Not in blackness though, in Americanness. My sense of purpose in life travels in two directions, toward the ancestors and the children. And as we stand, slack handed, watching a dishonorable world, my face burns hot.
As we stand, slack handed, watching a dishonorable world, my face burns hot.
Being inside the walls while others are held outside, to walk freely while others are in cages, witnessing this nation spiraling to a new nadir, I find myself thinking not just “I must do something” but sometimes “perhaps I should not be here.” Perhaps to honor my grandmother’s legacy is not to stay and fight, but to turn my back on this place that has squandered the grace of her living.
I have written letters to my sons, since they were born. I share every bit I know but now I must admit I do not have the answers. I pray they can see clearly in the places where my gaze is clouded by tears and confusion. But I would not know how to explain this to her. Even though I believe she would understand.