The library held quiet
like two old hands
pressed firmly
upon a book.

Below me,
the jazz band warmed the room.

The drummer brushed the snare.
The piano showed
its black and white teeth.
A horn lifted one bright note
and let it wander
wherever it pleased.

Then the children ran.

White children
beneath a sign
that said

NO RUNNING.

They laughed,
fell down,
rose up,
and ran again.

Their feet improvised.

Their voices became trumpets.

Nobody tied their joy
to a chair.

Nobody told their bodies
that freedom must first
look like good behavior.

Their noise was given space
as grace.

But there she sat,
three years old,
her skin as brown as mine,
between two grandparents
brown as history,
brown as hands
that had worked,
prayed,
held children close,
and learned that love
sometimes needed boundaries
to bring its babies home.

Four chairs around her.

Four feet wide.
Six feet long.

Four by six.

Not yet the six by eight
of a jail cell,
but close enough
for an old warning
to take shape.

Sit down, baby.

Be still.

Stay close.

Don’t run.

They did not want
to break her spirit.

They wanted to keep
the world
from breaking her.

Her feet swung
above the floor,
still believing
they were wings.

She leaned toward the music.
She leaned toward the children.
She leaned toward a world
that opened wider
for somebody else.

One small hand
crossed the border.

Smack.

Not hard enough
to call it harm.

Soft enough
to know love
was inside it.

Her grandfather pulled her near.
Her grandmother smoothed her sleeve.

Stay with us, baby.

They knew
what she did not know.

They knew a Black child’s laughter
can become disturbance
before the echo dies.

Running
can become resisting.

Touching
can become taking.

A question
can become talking back.

So they gave her
the lesson their generation
had been given:

Make the boundary yourself
before the world
builds one around you.

Four by six.

Hands to yourself.

Four by six.

Keep your voice low.

Four by six.

Stay where love
can reach you.

Better four chairs now
than four walls later.

Better a warning
from hands that adore you
than punishment
from hands that do not.

This was not cruelty.

This was care
with an old fear
living inside it.

This was protection
learned in a country
where bringing a Black child home
was sometimes considered
a victory.

Still,
she watched the white children run.

Their childhood spilled
across the floor
like sunlight.

Hers remained seated
between two people
who loved her enough
to fear what freedom
might cost her.

Then the jazz began.

The drummer gave the room
a heartbeat.

The piano went left
when the melody said right.

The horn climbed
through every rule
the air had given it.

The white children danced.

The brown child
moved one foot.

Then the other.

A small rhythm
beneath her chair.

A freedom
no larger than a shoe.

Her grandmother held her hand,
and the girl looked up,
not angry,
not ashamed,
only three,
only wondering
why music would call her name
if she was not allowed
to answer.

I sat above them
with a closed book
in my lap.

The library held quiet.

The horn did not.

And I wanted to tell her:

Run, little child.

Laugh while your voice
still belongs to you.

Take up the room
they have already begun
to measure against you.

But I understood
the hands holding her.

I understood how love,
when raised beneath threat,
might build a four-by-six boundary
to keep a child
from a six-by-eight cell.

She did not know that yet.

She was three.

She knew only
chair,
warning,
grandmother’s hand,
grandfather’s knee.

She knew other children
could cross the signs
and still be children.

She knew the music
had begun.

She knew her feet
wanted to go.

The horn cried out.

The children ran.

The sign kept saying

NO RUNNING.

And the only child
being taught to obey it
was the child
whose grandparents
loved her enough
to know
the sign was not
the greatest danger
in the room.

The building looked like it had forgotten people were supposed to come inside.

Two cars in the parking lot.

No students moving in or out. No conversations spilling onto the sidewalk. No gathering that I could see. Just a historic building sitting quietly in the middle of one of the most historically significant Black neighborhoods in our city.

The building itself has history. Built in the 1970s and recently renovated, it serves as the African American and African Studies Community Extension Center for a major predominantly white university. It sits roughly three miles from the university’s main campus.

Three miles.

But standing there, it felt like hundreds.

Maybe distance is not always measured by how long it takes to drive somewhere. Maybe sometimes distance is measured by investment. By attention. By how often people gather. By whether a place feels woven into the life surrounding it or merely planted there.

The building’s exterior still carried traces of hope. You could imagine the ribbon cutting. The speeches. The photographs. The promises about community and access and what this space might become.

But ribbon cuttings grow old.

And sometimes the promises made beside them do too.

I couldn’t shake the thought that once something in America is dubbed Black, it can be devalued and depreciated rather quickly. Sometimes financially. Sometimes culturally. Sometimes simply through distance and neglect. A thing doesn’t have to be destroyed to become disconnected.

Sometimes you just stop tending to it.

And there I was holding a box of books.

The books had already traveled farther than I had that afternoon.

My aunt originally gave them to my father. My father read them, kept them in great condition, and eventually passed them to me because he knew about the book work I have been fortunate enough to do in the community.

Over the last two years, through my work and community partnerships, we have helped put more than 15,000 books into people’s hands and neighborhoods and helped build three community libraries.

So books find me.

And, increasingly, people trust me to help books find somewhere else to go.

These particular books had traveled a few hundred miles to my neck of the woods looking for another home.

They were mostly African-American titles. History. Culture. Political thought. Books that perhaps a novice reader wouldn’t immediately pull from a shelf, but books someone wanting to dig deeper into African-American history might be grateful to discover.

Books for the curious.

Books for someone who has already asked the first question and is ready for the second.

There were only seven of them.

My coworker suggested the Community Extension Center.

And it made perfect sense.

Black books.

A Black neighborhood.

An African American and African Studies center.

I wasn’t trying to start a literacy initiative. I wasn’t asking anyone for money. There wasn’t a proposal attached to the box.

My father simply had seven good books he had already read and wanted to invest them back into a community.

Sometimes community engagement should be that simple.

I carried the box toward the entrance and looked through the glass.

That’s when I saw them.

Two empty bookshelves.

I almost smiled.

You know those moments when something lines up so perfectly that you assume the rest of the story has already been written?

This was one of those.

My aunt’s books had traveled to my father. My father had passed them to me. They had traveled a few hundred miles. I had driven them into a historically Black neighborhood, to an African American studies center, and there, waiting just beyond the glass, were empty shelves.

All that remained was maybe ten feet.

I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again.

Eventually, a woman came to the door.

She was white.

And I mention that not because I am interested in making her the villain of this story. I’m not. She was polite. I have no reason to call her racist, and I won’t manufacture intent simply because the symbolism makes for a better essay.

But symbolism does not require a villain to remain symbolism.

She opened the door partially and looked out at me. Maybe cautious. Maybe surprised. And I was conscious of myself too. A Black man standing outside a building after two in the afternoon holding a box and knocking on a door no one seemed particularly interested in opening.

I introduced myself.

Told her where I worked.

Told her I had some books I wanted to donate.

She looked at me and said something along the lines of, “I don’t think we have room.”

And I looked behind her.

At the empty shelves.

Now, I have lived long enough to know that every thought does not need to become a spoken thought.

This was one of those moments.

I politely pointed toward the bookshelves.

She explained that she wasn’t able to make the decision about accepting the books and that I would need to contact the director.

Fair enough.

She was doing her job.

And yet, walking back to my car later, I realized that what I needed from her in that moment wasn’t necessarily for her to do her job.

I needed someone to do their purpose.

There is a difference.

Community work dies when everyone can explain why something isn’t their decision.

Sometimes purpose is simply recognizing what has arrived at your door.

Seven books.

Two empty shelves.

A Black man saying his father would like to give something back.

Maybe purpose, in that moment, was figuring out how to make the distance between those things shorter.

She handed me the director’s business card.

I looked at the name and told her I had reached out to this person several times over the past couple of years hoping to connect about community work and hadn’t received a response.

She said they were very busy and hopefully they would respond.

Hopefully.

I walked back to my car.

Still carrying the books.

And somewhere between the front door and my driver’s seat, the whole thing became larger to me than what had actually happened.

I am not naive enough to believe seven books were going to save a neighborhood that has been saving itself for generations.

Seven books aren’t reversing gentrification. They aren’t rebuilding Black businesses or returning families priced out of homes. They aren’t resurrecting everything a neighborhood has lost.

I’ve helped distribute more than 15,000 books.

I understand both the power and the limitations of a book.

But I also know what an empty shelf means.

It means there is room.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about how strange it is that Black history can be studied academically while Black people carrying Black stories can still have difficulty getting them through the door.

Maybe that is part of the tension between institutions and communities.

Institutions need procedures.

Communities need relationships.

Institutions need someone authorized to say yes.

Communities sometimes just need someone willing to recognize the yes already standing in front of them.

And maybe that is why those three miles between the extension center and the university’s main campus kept bothering me.

Three miles isn’t far.

But America has built enormous distances out of smaller things.

A highway.

A property line.

A school district.

A neighborhood name.

A door opened only halfway.

Sometimes a community can sit three miles from immense resources and still feel hundreds of miles away from them.

Sometimes the doors aren’t even locked.

They’re open.

Technically.

You just need the right person to answer them.

The books are still in my car.

I haven’t given them anywhere else yet.

Maybe stubbornness is part of inheritance too.

My aunt gave them to my father. My father read them and gave them to me. They passed through three Black hands because each person believed knowledge should keep moving after it has finished serving us.

And I still want them in that neighborhood.

So maybe I’ll knock again.

I probably will.

Those books traveled hundreds of miles to find a home.

Somehow, the longest distance of their journey became the final ten feet between a Black man’s hands and an empty shelf.

Liner Note:

Two weeks later, I found a home for the books.

Less than a mile from the building where they couldn’t make the final ten feet, near the Martin Luther King library, I found a community book box sitting along a busy city street.

I laughed.

Because for two weeks, those books had ridden with me. Back and forth to work. Morning traffic. Afternoon traffic. By the time I finally stopped carrying them around, they had traveled another couple hundred miles during my ordinary commute.

My aunt gave them to my father. My father gave them to me. And then they rode around with me while I tried to find them what I thought was the perfect home.

Turns out, I was looking for perfect when maybe I should have been looking for purpose.

This is the Mt. Vernon, King-Lincoln, Bronzeville area of my city, a historically African American community where gentrification continues moving in, bringing new buildings, new money, new neighbors, and new questions about who gets to remain.

And somehow these Black books couldn’t make the move that first day.

Eventually, they did.

No application. No email. No approval.

Just a little book box with room.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe books are a kind of currency, and where books become scarce, some other form of poverty or displacement is often nearby. Maybe that’s why I’ve started giving books away as gifts, usually with handwritten notes, old-school style. I like playing matchmaker between titles and people, trying to find a little love between literacy and the life somebody is already living.

This made me think of you.

I think you’re ready for this one.

Keep this.

So I placed my father’s books inside that little box and hoped someone walking down that busy street would recognize something they needed. Maybe a title. Maybe a question. Maybe themselves.

They traveled hundreds of miles looking for what I thought would be the perfect place and settled less than a mile away in what may have been the most purposed one.

I closed the little door and walked back to my SUV without them.

And for the first time in a couple hundred miles, the middle seat was empty.

Somewhere behind me, seven books waited for strangers.

I hope they don’t stay there long.

I’ve not known you whole
Still let me rest in your warmth
And linger awhile

At a job I had, someone once told me, “I liked you better when you had hair.”

Which is wild, like I made an executive decision and my follicles weren’t involved.

I looked at them and said, “Well, that’s just another reason for me to stay bald.”

And honestly, that was the moment the tide turned. If my lack of hair made my likability plummet with someone I already didn’t particularly like, then baldness had suddenly found purpose.

I would embrace it boldly, beautifully, and, if necessary, entirely out of spite.

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Share Aaron Whitfield

Where have I been, y’all?

I haven’t posted anything here in what feels like a month of Sundays.

Life hasn’t been easy. Inspiration hasn’t been hard to find, but the time to write has been. Have you ever had so many things to write that not one idea seems willing to stay still long enough to become something? Every thought arrives carrying another thought. Every sentence opens three doors. I stand in the hallway trying to decide which room needs me first.

That is where I’ve been.

Walking this road. Not necessarily embracing the time away, but no longer fearing it as I did in my youth. Back then, I would have called this writer’s block. Stagnation. I would have treated every unwritten day as evidence that the gift was leaving me.

Nah.

This is marination.

This is me sitting in the hot bath of life, getting seasoned to be served at a later date.

I have been writing ideas down, though. Titles. Images. Sentences arriving without introductions. Paragraphs too young to know what they want to become. I am thankful the ideas keep flowing, even when my hands cannot keep pace with them.

The thing about inspiration is that sometimes it arrives on time, gleaming and polished, already shaped into something I can embrace. Other times, it arrives unexpectedly. Shaped by people. Forged in pain. Standing close enough to leave a scar before it ever leaves a paragraph.

But I am still here.

Writing, even when reeling.

Releasing, even when I do not feel relaxed.

One of the things about turning 42 is knowing life is not forever. Mortality gets more real each day, and some days I do not know what to do with that. Advancing in age and, hopefully, wisdom means traveling farther down a road that leads toward God and away from this life on Earth.

It is a constant march.

Life is the paragraph none of us chose the page or pen for, but all of us have been given some chance to write. We write until the moment comes. Mid-sentence. At the end of a sentence. At the beginning of a thought. Just as we reach for another chapter.

I think often about life after 40. Creativity. Divine purpose. What my existence means for the people around me. I tell myself I am divinely aligned, even on days when the direction feels uncertain.

God, has it really been more than ten years since I consistently attended church?

One day, I will write about being kicked out of a church 16 years ago. I will write about what it did to my belief in people, specifically people within the Black church. But that is another chapter, a paragraph I am not ready to start yet.

Sometimes I wonder whether there really is a God.

That is a real thought. I believe that if there is a God, which I believe there is, God would not mind the question. Divinity has often revealed itself most clearly after I questioned whether it was there. I am thankful God sees me, even when my words stumble like my faith. Even when paragraphs constructed in previous chapters begin to falter as I fight to believe what I once knew without effort.

God still sees me in this wild book of life I have somehow been written into.

In the past few weeks, I have written honestly about anger. About humanity. About revenge and wrath. Writing openly helps me recognize that anger is a fuel that burns hot but cannot burn forever.

I have joked that wanting “get back” is not godly. Still, I have been challenged to consider whether some forms of get back are necessary, particularly when protecting yourself and the people you love.

My thoughts have been darker lately. I have watched young children fly through our suburban development on electric scooters, weaving through traffic without helmets, shoes, or enough fear. Their heads barely rise above the handlebars. I wonder whether their parents have a subconscious death wish for them.

Perhaps that is too harsh.

Maybe I am too much of a helicopter parent. Maybe these children are cared for deeply. But I still pray for them. I still warn them to get out of traffic. I still wonder how a child feels when no one appears to be watching.

That is another chapter for another day.

Last week, I wrote a short story about revenge. Someone who had lied about me began crying after being confronted by one of her peers. Her tears created sympathy. Her sobbing gathered a crowd in the break room.

I sat a few feet away as people began consoling her.

And I wanted some get back.

There was a box of tissues on the table. One tissue stood alone, disconnected from the others. As she reached for it, I reached first.

I took the tissue.

It was a small win, but a win nonetheless. Her nose began to run. The evidence landed on the table. Sympathy briefly gave way to disgusted faces in the audience.

I smiled.

I did not even need the tissue. I balled it up, placed it in my pocket, and sat there satisfied with the results.

It was not godly.

But it was me.

Another paragraph in this thing called life. A story that still brings a slight smile to my face and might provide a spark for someone else.

Maybe it is a meaningless story. But I am learning that no story is entirely meaningless. Each one carries us toward the next letter, sentence, paragraph, chapter, book, and collection of volumes. Even the stories that reveal something ugly in us can become useful if we are honest enough to let them.

So, where have I been?

I have been living the pages I haven’t posted yet.

I have been gathering sentences from scars, questions from faith, and stories from the parts of myself I am still learning how to tell the truth about.

I haven’t stopped writing.

I am simply still being seasoned.

Liner Note:

I have noticed that everything that hits me cannot become a written piece requiring deep rumination, although some things can. Every moment of introspection cannot become an essay. Every reflection cannot become a song or poem. Every fleeting thought cannot be captured, polished, and made permanent.

Simply put, every lyric is not a hit.

That is one of the things I have learned during these past few months of not posting as much. I am writing about me, and sometimes, in that process, I need time to process me. I am not AI. I am not a machine, even if I am just as complex. I cannot immediately turn every wound into wisdom, every difficult encounter into a lesson, or every passing thought into something worth reading.

Sometimes I need to let a feeling remain a feeling before asking it to become art.

I am glad I have not written much lately. Whatever I might have written would have been real, honest, and authentically me. But the subject matter and depth would not have been to my liking. And quite frankly, some people are not worth an essay.

Few are.

Some people deserve no more than a sentence. Some moments are only worth a scribble in the margins. Some thoughts need to remain unfinished, not because they lack meaning, but because I have not lived with them long enough to understand what they mean.

So I jot down a note on Substack, sometimes a few, and release them into the world. No grand conclusion. No forced revelation. Just a small piece of what passed through me that day.

Still reflection. Still expression. Still me.

Still art.

Because I have not stopped writing. I have simply stopped forcing every thought to become more than it is. Some pages are ready to be posted. Others are still marinating, waiting for life to finish seasoning the story.

This is one of those pages.

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I watched those men
come walking tall,
large in ego,
logos stretched
across barrel chests,
supposed to be cheering children
into a new space,
clapping them through
the schoolhouse doors.

Clap, men, clap.

But half-hearted hands
make half-hearted music,
and soon it looked
like those men
were clapping for themselves.

Big men.
Broad men.
Manly men
with loud, barreling laughter.
Giants in the sight of children,
egos fuller than hearts.

Fathers, some.
Dads, some.
Men, all.
But gods they were not,
though they paraded like heaven
had called them by name.

Then rain dripped down
from heavenly skies.

Lord, the rain came down.

And all that loud manhood
grew worried over hair,
outfits,
and photographs meant for hashtags.

Rain does not photograph well
when the picture is performance.

So shelter was sought.
Clapping became inconvenient.
Bright smiles disappeared
beneath gray skies
and the shadows of large egos
projecting father, dad, leader.

Umbrellas opened,
but not for children
with fresh-cut fades,
nervous faces,
brown skin,
or braids and edges
gelled and laid the night before.

Children walking into systems
that need prayer,
advocacy,
and somebody willing
to stand in the rain.

Children who need your faith,
not your following.

Not for the women
still cheering in the drizzle.

Nah.

Each man covered himself,
his clothes,
his logo,
his dry little kingdom.

I watched men afraid
the rain might melt them,
while children walked uncovered
toward unfamiliar doors.

Funny thing:

The smallest bodies
carried the biggest courage.

And God, who owns the sky,
kept raining,
needing no shelter,
no photograph,
no hashtag,
no logo,
and no applause.

Liner Notes:

Y’all, this happened yesterday, about twenty-four hours before this piece was posted.

And listen, maybe these brothers are good brothers. I think many of them probably are. But even good brothers can be influenced by group thinking, taking cues from leaders they have bargained social pathways toward, learning when to laugh, when to clap, when to shelter, and when to follow.

Honestly, some of these brothers looked conflicted. More camera-ready than heart-available.

And this moment required your heart. Your hands. Your eyes. It required more than your presence. More than your logo. More than your hashtag. More than the hip-hop track accompanying your Facebook reel, making the performance feel like brotherhood because the beat underneath it said so.

The children did not need a reel.

They needed you to be real.

Authentic.

They needed you to show up in the fullness of your humanity, not the fullness of your ego. They needed covering from men who claim to cover communities. They needed your faith, not your following.

Jay-Z said, “This is not a diss song, it’s a real song,” on “Lost One.”

Consider this a real song.

Not an attack on your character, but a question about what your character did when the rain came. And if you leave this piece with your ego bruised, good.

Maybe a bruise is evidence that something real reached you.

I. The Door

It was ninety degrees outside.

The city is on fire. The kind that makes shade feel like mercy and cold water feel like enough.

Someone with me wanted coffee. I wanted a cup of ice water. So we headed into a neighborhood coffee shop while they waited for their order. I walked a few paces away from the counter and did what I always do.

I observed.

Writers are silent watchers. We save pieces before we save sentences.

The fragrance of fresh coffee lingered in the air before anyone spoke. The aroma of rich espresso danced across the room, settling on the warm brown wood lining the walls and making the shop feel a little less like a business and more like someone’s favorite room. Sunlight spilled across worn tables. The grinder broke conversations up only long enough to return them. A barista called a regular by name before they walked to the register.

Most of the space was occupied by people in their twenties, thirties, and forties, casually enjoying hot drinks in the cool of the cafe’s air.

Friends leaned together over mugs and steadily brewed conversation intimately, taking time to look out the window to the city street where heat scorched downtown pavement. A young couple laughed about something only they knew. Someone tapped a laptop as someone else read soundlessly. Strangers opened a door for people they don’t know.

For just a few quiet minutes, no one looked like a customer.

They looked like neighbors.

If someone came into that room and asked what looks like the American dream, they might’ve pointed right there.

Young people.

Good coffee.

Meaningful work.

Conversation.

Different cultures mixing within the same space without making their differences a fact.

It was beautiful.

I don’t say this reluctantly.

It truly was.

But I couldn’t let myself lift the moment into a dreamland, a utopian fantasy upon the eyes and soul.

No.

Not because anything about the room was wrong.

Because my personal reality was asking different questions.

As I stood there waiting, I noticed how differently a room can speak depending upon the life you lived before you walk into it.

I wasn’t lonely.

I wasn’t unwelcome.

Those are two different things, right?

But there’s a certain kind of solitude that can exist even in beautiful rooms. A solitude that’s not a result of being invisible. It’s the wondering whether belonging is something you've fully lived through the way it seems to be for others.

That was the first thing I noticed.

The second thing I noticed was the question.

II. Waiting

I wondered what the same room looked like inside a Black-owned coffee shop on an average Tuesday.

I don’t know.

I don’t have facts.

No survey.

No market report.

Only some decades of quietly observing.

Watching for someone else’s coffee, I thought about average support.

Not sympathy.

Not guilt.

Not a campaign.

Only the quiet act of choosing the other. The kind where you’ll keep coming back just because you belong to your community.

I thought about Black-owned bookshops.

Coffee shops.

Restaurants.

Barber shops.

Florists.

Small businesses built one customer at a time by people whose families have spent generations helping build this country.

At some point along the line, I wondered if our resiliency became evidence to some that we didn’t need anyone to care.

As if surviving so much meant needing less love.

It wasn’t a conclusion.

Just a question.

Sometimes that’s where the most genuine writing starts.

III. The Room

People say that African Americans are descendants of slaves.

I’ve never liked that statement.

We are descendants of people that were enslaved. We are descendants of people who built advanced ancient civilizations. We are the descendants of people who birthed all of humanity.

There is a world in that correction.

Our history didn’t start with shackles on.

Before bondage, someone was teaching a child to say their first words. Someone was trying to convince that child to finish eating. Someone was dreaming about their future, and wrestling with uncertainty. Someone was carving wood. Someone was working the crops. Someone laughed too hard at a family dinner. Someone was late coming home because conversation ran longer than expected. Someone was wonderfully, beautifully ordinary.

History has rarely allowed Black people to be ordinary before asking us to become extraordinary.

Oftentimes, America meets us at the moment of our suffering, rather than the fullness of our humanity.

Some histories are not untold. They just are simply spoken too softly.

Books are gone. Lessons become shorter. Stories become more easily digestible than they are to grasp.

Still memory endures.

Sometimes in books. Sometimes in songs. Sometimes in the people who refuse to let either go.

IV. The Questions

If you ever want to see hurt, call the Black folks.

Not because hurt is ours. It isn’t. But we’ve mastered its language. See our faces. There are generations of life behind our eyes. A grandmother who wouldn’t give up hope. A father who worries that his children never see. A young man wondering whether he’ll be welcome before he is judged.

Pain has a way of traveling through generations.

Not to describe a people. But to remind them what they’ve survived.

And yet, when the world calls, we show out.

I’ve watched African Americans walk alongside with communities whose pasts are different from ours because we recognize the sound of injustice. We organize. We comfort. We pray. We sing. We stand. History taught us about what happens when no one comes. So we’ve spent generations ensuring that somebody does.

V. The Table

This isn’t a condemnation. It’s a point of view.

This is the point of view of a Black man standing within a beautiful coffee shop waiting for someone else’s coffee.

Sometimes it feels as though African Americans occupy an in-between place. Close enough to influence culture. Not quite close enough to be offered the same ordinary welcome. We teach the dances. We write the songs. We mold language. We affect fashion. Our creativity tends to go further than our humanity goes. Sometimes it seems like we’re invited to the rally before we’re invited to the table. Bring your voice. Bring your songs. Bring your righteous anger. Bring the tears carried by generations. Help shape history. And then, when the signs are folded up and the cameras are gone, ordinary belonging can seem so close yet still so out of reach.

Belonging isn't measured by who stands beside you when history is being made. It's measured by who remembers who you are after history becomes ordinary again. Who spends money in your neighborhood. Who walks through your front door. Who chooses your coffee shop because it's yours. Who makes room for you at the kitchen table without a headline, a hashtag, or a flag. Community has never been built by speeches. It has always been built by habits.

VI. The Walk

The irony is that the coffee shop left me feeling both hopeful and heartbroken. No one there made me feel unwanted. Quite the opposite. The room reminded me that another way of living together is possible. No one looked as if they wanted to perform diversity. They were just sharing space. Maybe that’s the point. Belonging isn’t always met with applause. Sometimes it takes the form of someone holding the door. Someone remembering your name. Someone coming back because your business is part of the neighborhood.

And yet, there was a double shot of hurt, infused into the flavor of this coffee experience, strong, sharp, woven into the flavor profile that blends grief within the day’s ease. A particular torment that may arrive just by being African American on a hot summer day, and having the freedom to enjoy a cup of coffee under the orange of the sun while equally sipping on the remembrance that some of my ancestors drank sweat from their brows while looking up at that same very sky.

Here I am, in this coffee shop, sweating, yes, from the heat outside, but also because I know that being Black in America often means providing your own fan when the world turns up the heat. People see us sweat, and few ask why, let alone offer relief. Yet when a cause calls, we are often the ones who bring both relief and release, carrying with us the quiet realization that the people we so readily support may never show up for us with the same fullness that we have shown them.

Eventually, the person with me heard their name. Their coffee was ready, and we walked back into the afternoon continuing our walk.

The heat was still there. The sidewalks still glowed. The day hadn’t changed, but something within me had.

VII. The Water

A few blocks further, I looked down at my empty hands. I hadn’t forgotten the water. I just had a thirst for something else. Somewhere between waiting for someone else’s coffee, listening to the room breathe, and wondering about what belonging requires of us, my thirst shifted. I walked into that coffee shop looking for something simple. Cold water. I walked out with questions. Questions about memory. Questions about reciprocity. Questions about friendship. Questions about kinship. Questions about why we, Black folks, are everybody’s fan on a hot summer day, and yet, when we sweat, we somehow get overlooked when cold water is passed out.

As we kept walking under the sun, the first few words of a familiar song drifted quietly through my mind.

O say can you see...

Before I got to the end of the next line, another question.

O say...why can’t y’all see us?

See us before the headlines. Before the hashtags. Before the protests. See us as neighbors. Parents. Coffee shop regulars. As people who fight for your cause because we recognize ourselves in you.

O say, can you see yourself in us, in the mirror of our eyes and the tone of our skin? Or do you see us only as a means to your own freedom? We have carried more than our share of causes, believing that justice, once poured, would fill every cup. Too often, it hasn’t. Too often, we’re invited to the table only long enough to brew the coffee, stir the conversation, and strengthen the movement, only to be discarded like the paper cup after the last sip. Disposable once the warmth is gone.

I left that coffee shop, warm with hope, and yet chilled by a history that is a cold brew to consume, even on a hot day. The heat still pressed on my skin. The pavement of summer still radiated beneath my feet. But the heaviest thing I carried home wasn’t the heat. It was the weight of being seen only when you’re needed and forgotten when you’re not.

This is a thirst that even the coldest water cannot quench.

Liner Note (The Grounds):

I don’t drink coffee.

Never have. Well, that isn’t true. Generally once a year, I need half a cup to get my energy where it needs to be after a night of little to no sleep.

But under normal circumstances, give me water. Give me hot chocolate. Give me lemonade. Give me Kool-Aid.

Just don’t give me coffee.

But you don’t have to drink coffee to see what becomes of it. I’ve been around enough baristas and coffee snobs to know the process.

A bean comes whole.

It is harvested.

Roasted in the fire.

Cracked open.

Ground down to maximize flavor extraction.

And then water, just under a boil, between 195°F and 205°F, is poured over it, pulling out all that is valued to the consumer. The sweet aroma fills the room. The warmth of the brew draws people together at tables. Conversations are made. Ideas are shared. Laughter is conceived. Relationships deepen. Memories are made. Lives are changed.

People remember the coffee.

Few people think about the grounds.

Not so long ago, someone whom I respect said something that’s stuck in my head. They said, “African Americans are often the epitome of the strong friend nobody remembers to call and check on.”

I haven’t been able to push that sentence from my head. Maybe because I’ve lived parts of it. We’re often the ones who show up. We bring the tissues before people ask. We bring enough food to last a family the next couple of days. We purchase the poster board and the markers before the protest kicks off. We design the shirts, purchasing them with our own money because freedom, after all, even if not for ourselves, is a worthy cause. We make the phone calls. We send the text messages. We bring the gas masks. We organize the volunteers. We lead the rallying cries. We stay after everyone else has left to clean up and discuss the logistics for the next rally. We hug, we hold hands, we hashtag, and we repeat.

Then we’re forgotten.

When someone else’s world shatters, we know how to be there because our own history taught us what it feels like when no one comes. Showing up has become part of our legacy.

Maybe we’re part of the problem.

Maybe we’ve confused friendship with family. Those are two very different things.

Friends celebrate your birthday.

Kin remembers your sorrows.

Friends cheer for your victories.

Kin notices your silence.

Friends ask what happened.

Kin asks how you’re doing.

Friends stand beside you during history.

Kin stays beside you after history becomes ordinary again.

Perhaps that’s what I was wrestling with in that coffee shop. It is not about whether people care. Many do. But do they care enough to shield us from the heat or cradle us when we cry? To lift our voices when we can’t sing because our vocal cords have grown tired from generations of crying out for the right to be seen, valued, respected, and fought for?

Have we sometimes confused standing together with belonging together? Have we confused proximity with kinship? Those questions stem from love, not spite. Love always dreams of a deeper relationship.

Maybe that’s why I kept thinking about coffee. Not because I drink it, but because of what’s left when everyone has taken what they came for.

The grounds.

The part people call used, even though it created the flavor, the aroma, the morning’s jolt of energy, and the evening’s quiet warmth.

Used.

That word has always sounded incomplete to me.

Gardeners know something the rest of us often forget. The grounds are not done. They nourish the soil. They help provide what comes next. They become part of a life that another person will eventually enjoy.

Perhaps people are like that too. Perhaps communities are. Perhaps the measure of a life isn’t how much of yourself you poured into the cup. Perhaps it’s whether someone notices there is still beauty, dignity, wisdom, and life in what’s left after you’ve given so much away.

I still won’t drink coffee. But I know enough about it to recognize the grounds. And sometimes, if I’m being honest, I know precisely how they feel.

Not discarded.

Not empty.

Not done.

Just praying that one day the people gathered around the table will remember that the richest part of any cup was never just what it produced.

It was always what it came from.

Today, I ordered a hot chocolate.

It was warm.

This is how this essay came about. I am sitting here sipping a warm chocolate I wanted hot, wondering why there is no temperature system for ordering these drinks.

We have one for steak.

“How would you like that cooked?”

Rare. Medium rare. Medium. Medium well. Well done.

Why does beef receive this level of precision, but chocolate gets whatever temperature the machine is emotionally capable of producing that day?

Ask me how I want it.

Warm. Hot. Very hot. Well done. Lawsuit hot.

Give me lawsuit hot. I want to sign a waiver before the first sip. I want steam rising from the cup like a warning. I want to hold it for ten minutes and reflect upon the decisions that brought me there. I want the first sip to threaten the roof of my mouth.

More importantly, I want the experience of allowing my hot chocolate to become warm.

That is my journey.

You do not get to begin my journey at the destination.

Most people do not think about this. They receive a warm drink, shrug, and continue living.

But I care.

I care care.

That is not a character flaw. It is a character enhancement. My quirks make the world more entertaining, although admittedly more complicated for me and everyone standing nearby. I also lack a poker face. My expression responds to an offense before my better judgment has entered the building.

To anyone I have offended unjustly, I apologize.

If I have offended you justly, I meant it.

Let us begin with hand sanitizer. Do not apply sanitizer and immediately shake my hand. Your hand is wet. Yes, it is technically clean, but it is also wet, and nobody wants a wet handshake.

You cannot initiate sanitation and social contact simultaneously. Complete one transaction before beginning another.

Let it dry.

Then there is door holding. I hold doors for anyone within fifteen or twenty feet. Sometimes I stand there so long that I regret the decision, but I committed to the hold. Now we are both involved.

If I am ten feet behind you, hold the door. Do not look back, see me approaching, calculate my speed, and decide I am too far away. What is this, the Olympic trials?

And yes, I am a man. You may still hold the door for me.

Kindness is not gender-specific.

Restaurants create another problem. If I arrive casually dressed, people sometimes assume I am a delivery driver. There is nothing wrong with delivering food. I am simply not doing it. I am picking up food I purchased for myself.

Apparently, I now need to wear a three-piece suit to retrieve wings.

“Delivery pickup?”

“No. Personal wings.”

It is strange how quickly clothing becomes a biography. A hoodie becomes an occupation. Casualness becomes evidence. I came for dinner, and somehow my outfit has been entered into testimony.

I also have firm rules about chips. If I offer you some, I will pour them onto a napkin. I will not hand you the bag so you can insert your entire arm and excavate it like a construction site.

Why are you rummaging?

These are chips, not Scrabble pieces. You do not need to feel every chip before discovering the one that completes your word.

Tell me how many you want. I will distribute them. There must be order.

Food trucks are another scam everyone has agreed to pretend is charming.

I am paying premium restaurant prices for food served in a foam container with plastic cutlery. The knife has no depth. No grit. No teeth. It touches the chicken and immediately surrenders. Now I am outside sawing through an eighteen-dollar entrée with something possessing the structural integrity of a church fan.

There is no table. I must locate one myself and inspect it for bird poop. The wind is stealing my napkins. My drink is between my feet. The container will not remain closed. Yet I am expected to smile and say, “This is amazing.”

Is it?

I paid restaurant prices and did half the restaurant’s job.

Restrooms also require boundaries. I recently realized that I avoid looking at people as they leave one. Who wants to make eye contact immediately after completing a bowel or bladder movement?

There should be a reentry period.

Give me sixty seconds to wash my hands, collect my dignity, and return to public life. Do not greet me at the restroom door. Making eye contact with someone as they leave a restroom feels like petting a dog while walking away from a murder scene. It is an innocent gesture occurring suspiciously close to a crime.

Someone who rarely speaks to me recently greeted me while leaving the restroom. Why now? You have had countless opportunities to acknowledge me, yet you chose the exact moment you were returning from the toilet?

No.

Let the hallway air restore you.

I also keep my eyes open during prayer over food. Somebody must watch the food. Flies do not respect prayer. I also want to identify the other people whose eyes are open because I do not trust them.

They could be the devil.

Of course, they are probably watching me for the same reason.

Elevators present a different problem. Are we required to speak? We are strangers temporarily trapped inside a metal box. Silence should be permitted.

People say, “Have a good day.”

What if good is not enough? Maybe this person needs a great day. Maybe they planned to have a terrible day and now I have imposed an unreasonable expectation.

I prefer silence and voice-activated buttons. Nobody cleans elevator buttons. We have artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and watches that monitor our hearts, yet I must still press a tiny public circle touched by ten thousand fingers.

Where is the wet-hand-sanitizer person when I actually need them?

The truth is, I notice nearly everything, even when I wish I did not. If words are placed before me, I read them. This includes the signs held by people experiencing houselessness.

Unfortunately, reading an entire sign sometimes suggests that I am about to reach into my pocket. I rarely carry cash, so my literacy may be creating false hope.

For that, I am sorry.

But what am I supposed to do? Look away because I cannot give something? Pretend a person becomes invisible when I do not have cash?

Perhaps reading the sign is not enough. I know it is not. But someone wrote those words because they wanted to be seen, and I do not want convenience to train my eyes toward indifference.

This is the complication of paying attention. Sometimes you notice a warm drink. Sometimes you notice a hand entering your chip bag. Sometimes you notice a person the rest of the world has practiced looking through. Attention does not always tell you what to do, but it refuses to let you pretend you saw nothing.

Of course, attention has also taught me that ketchup requires consent.

I like ketchup. I simply want control over its application. I dunk my fries. I do not lather them. Someone recently offered me tater tots that had already been ketchuped.

Who pre-ketchups another person’s tots?

You have removed my agency. I accepted them because I have manners, but internally, the relationship had changed.

And if a cashier opens another register and says, “I can take the next person,” that means the next person. It does not mean whoever can run there fastest.

I was once next when people four and five positions behind me rushed toward the new register. They were not next. They were not even next to next. They were next to the next to the next to the next.

They did this without shame.

Civilization cannot survive this.

Perhaps my quirks are tiny rules created to establish order in an unpredictable world.

Let the sanitizer dry.

Hold the door.

Keep your construction-site hands out of my chips.

Let the restroom air clear.

Do not ketchup without consent.

And if you charge me eighteen dollars for chicken, provide a knife capable of defeating it.

I know my face occasionally delivers a verdict harsher than the offense deserves. I am trying to offer grace to line cutters, wet-handed shakers, aggressive chip rummagers, and food-truck owners handing me plasticware. Paying attention should make me more compassionate, not merely more critical.

Because a life is constructed from what we notice. A closing door. A handwritten sign. A stranger beside us in an elevator. Steam rising from a cup, or the absence of it. These details may appear small, but small things are where most of us spend our lives.

Still, I ordered a hot chocolate today.

It was warm.

I know most people would let this go.

I will not.

I wanted to hold the heat. I wanted to wait. I wanted to decide when it became warm. Sometimes the smallest freedom is receiving exactly what you asked for, then allowing it to become something else in your own time.

Hot means hot.

Liner Note:

Even as I prepare to post this piece, the world hands me another quirk.

I do not like awkward laughter when nothing funny has happened.

I am sitting in a library, writing an essay about all the small things that bother me, when someone approaches and asks me to move because they need the space for a show.

Now, this is a perfectly reasonable request. I do not own the table. I did not reserve it. My ancestors did not fight to secure this particular corner of the library. I can move.

But the person says, “I don’t know if you’ve heard,” followed by a nervous chuckle, “but we’re setting up for a show,” followed by another nervous chuckle, “and we need this space.”

Then came one final chuckle and a slight tilt of the head.

Three laughs.

Not one joke.

I started looking around to see if I had missed something. Was the show already happening? Was this the opening scene? Was I playing the unsuspecting man who had occupied a table of tremendous importance?

Because if you need me to move, just tell me. You do not need to smuggle the request inside three nervous laughs. I am not going to fight for the table. It has four legs and several scratches. I can find another one.

But perhaps the laughter was understandable.

Maybe they did not know how I would respond. Sometimes laughter is not a response to humor. Sometimes it is anxiety escaping through the mouth. Sometimes people laugh because they are attempting to make an uncomfortable moment feel softer than it is.

And there I was, dressed in the same casual clothing I mentioned earlier, the kind that apparently makes restaurant workers assume I am an Uber Eats driver.

Maybe they were thinking, What is the Uber driver doing in the library? Shouldn’t he be delivering somebody’s hot food?

Hot food.

The imaginary customers are receiving hot meals while the imaginary Uber driver is sitting in a library writing an entire essay because his hot chocolate was served warm.

Everyone in this story has access to heat except me.

Some family is probably sitting at home staring at the delivery app.

“Why hasn’t our driver moved in forty-five minutes?”

The app says, “Your driver has one stop before you.”

Yes.

The nonfiction section.

When viewed from that perspective, I understand the nervous laughter. This person had to approach a casually dressed man who appeared to have abandoned several food deliveries so he could document his grievances against beverage temperatures.

I might have laughed nervously too.

And that is the strange thing about quirks. They begin as judgments about other people until you turn them around and discover yourself standing on the other side. Perhaps the person was laughing because they were uncomfortable. Perhaps I was not laughing because I was uncomfortable. Two strangers were trying to survive the same harmless interaction using opposite strategies.

They laughed.

I stared.

Together, we created a complete social failure.

But I moved. I gathered my belongings, picked up my warm chocolate, and surrendered the table without incident.

For the record, I hope the show is funny.

After all, somebody in this library should earn all that laughter.

It has taken me several days to write this.

Not because I did not know what I wanted to say.

Because every time I opened the photograph, I found myself staring a little longer.

News photographs usually ask us to move on. They demand our attention for a moment before another headline replaces them. This one refused to let me leave. I enlarged it on my phone until the flags became colors and the uniforms dissolved into shadows. Until there was only your face.

I kept asking myself the same question.

Why can I not stop looking?

Then I realized it was not this photograph alone that had settled into my spirit.

It was another one.

Dorothy Counts.

I have often wondered if photographs remember one another.

If somewhere, beyond the limits of what cameras can capture, the image of Dorothy Counts recognized yours before the rest of us did.

In 1957, Dorothy Counts walked toward Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Around her was a crowd laughing, mocking, shouting, following. A young Black woman surrounded by people who wanted history to remember their anger more than her courage.

History often remembers the crowd.

I remembered Dorothy.

When I saw you sitting on that Metro train, history folded in on itself.

Different decade.

Different uniforms.

Different train.

The same ache.

The same question.

How many times must Black women carry moments they never volunteered to carry?

As a Black man, it hurts my heart.

As a father raising children who deserve better than recycled versions of old hatred, it hurts my heart.

As an uncle.

As a friend.

As simply another man trying to love people the way Christ loved people.

It hurts my heart.

Because no daughter of God should have to sit inside someone else’s performance of intimidation simply to get home.

I do not know where you were headed that day.

I do not know whether you prayed before those train doors closed.

I do not know whether your hands trembled afterward.

I do not know whether you cried when no one else could see you.

And I do not need to know.

Your story belongs to you.

The world has already demanded enough from Black women.

But after days of staring at this photograph, one memory kept returning to me.

My grandmother used to talk about people who were covered in prayer.

She believed there were moments people survived because somebody, somewhere, had already spoken their name before God.

Sometimes it was a praying mother.

Sometimes it was a grandmother.

Sometimes it was a church.

Sometimes it was a stranger whose name they would never know.

She believed prayer was never confined by distance.

It was never limited by time.

She believed prayers could arrive before people ever knew they needed them.

As a little boy, I thought she was speaking in mysteries.

As a grown man looking at your photograph, I think I finally understand.

I found myself wondering who was praying for you.

Whose folded hands reached Heaven long before that train ever arrived.

Whose whispered prayer became your covering that afternoon.

Was it your grandmother?

Your mother?

A friend?

A pastor?

Someone on the other side of the country who simply felt led to pray for a woman they would never meet?

I do not know.

But someone was.

I believe that with everything in me.

And I am thankful.

Looking at that photograph, I made the same mistake many people probably made.

I thought you were alone.

Then I remembered what my grandmother taught me.

People covered in prayer are never alone.

Human eyes may see an empty seat.

Faith sees company.

I remembered Dorothy Counts.

I remembered Rosa Parks.

I remembered the women whose names history forgot but whose prayers still hold families together.

I remembered my grandmother.

I remembered the women who unlocked church doors before sunrise.

The women who folded bulletins.

The women who cooked after working all day.

The women who buried children and still found enough hope to sing, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

That seat was not empty.

It was crowded.

Crowded with prayers.

Crowded with women whose names history forgot but Heaven never did.

Crowded with God.

Scripture tells us that when three men entered the furnace there was already Another waiting inside.

God has never promised His people they would escape every fire.

He has promised they would never enter one unattended.

I do not know why it had to be you.

I wish it had not been.

I wish this photograph had never needed to exist.

But I also believe there is a mystery to God’s timing that we rarely understand while we are living inside it.

Perhaps one day this image will no longer be remembered because of the men who surrounded you.

Perhaps it will be remembered because of the woman who quietly reminded the world what dignity looks like.

Your presence preached.

Not because you spoke.

Because you did not have to.

It spoke to fathers like me who immediately thought about the women we love.

It spoke to daughters wondering if anyone sees them.

It spoke to sons learning what courage actually looks like.

It spoke to those of us who know that courage rarely arrives with applause.

It usually arrives looking like someone who simply remained.

So if these words ever find you, let them find you gently.

We see you.

We hear you.

We thank you.

Not because you chose to become a symbol.

But because your presence reminded us that dignity cannot be intimidated, that faith often looks like remaining, and that God’s company is rarely visible to cameras.

I pray that whatever fear found you that day has long since given way to peace.

I pray your full story, the one far greater than a single photograph, continues to bloom in God’s perfect time.

And I pray you always remember what my grandmother spent her life believing.

Some people walk through this world covered in prayers they never hear.

Maybe that is what I have been looking at all this time.

Not a woman sitting alone.

But a daughter wrapped in prayers spoken years before that train ever arrived.

Prayers from grandmothers.

Prayers from churches.

Prayers from strangers.

Prayers from saints already resting with the Lord.

The camera captured one seat.

God was filling another.

And perhaps that is the miracle the photograph could never quite hold.

Liner Note:

I rarely write about current events.

Not because I don’t care, but because the headlines move too quickly, and I have always been more interested in the people who remain after the cameras leave. There is already enough commentary about what happened. I find myself wondering what happened to the people who had to live through it.

This photograph would not let me go.

When I looked at it, I did not just see one unnamed woman on a Metro train. I saw my wife. I saw my daughter. I saw my mother. I saw my aunts. I saw my friends. I saw the many Black women who have loved me, prayed for me, corrected me, encouraged me, and helped shape the man I have become. Their faces kept finding their way into hers, and my preference for staying away from current events suddenly felt less important than saying something while my heart was still listening.

I have often wondered about the young woman who filmed the murder of George Floyd. I have wondered where she is now, how she is healing, and whether the weight of witnessing something so horrific has become lighter with time. I have wondered the same about Dorothy Counts, who walked into history as a young woman carrying burdens no young person should have to carry. Now I find myself wondering about the woman on this train.

There is something heartbreaking about the fact that each of these women was young, yet found herself standing face to face with an old evil. Racism in America often wears new clothes, but its soul is ancient. And somehow, generation after generation, young Black women have found themselves confronting it with a courage they never asked to possess.

This essay is my attempt to honor one of those women without asking her to carry anything more than she already has. It is also a reminder to myself that some stories deserve more than commentary. They deserve prayer. They deserve tenderness. They deserve witnesses who see not only what the camera captured, but what the camera could not.

I pray that wherever she is, she knows that she was never alone. And I pray that, long after the headlines have faded, we continue to see the quiet strength of those whose names we may never know, but whose presence reminds us that God still sits beside His children, even in the places that feel the coldest.

I was eight years old
when canser came
to my grandmother’s house.

That is how the sign said it.

Canser.

My younger cousin,
only a year younger than me,
wrote it in thick black marker
on notebook paper
and taped it to the front door.

PLEASE BE QUIET
GRANDMA HAS CANSER

The letters leaned.

The spelling wandered.

Nobody fixed it.

Nobody needed to.

Everybody understood.

Before canser,
Grandma’s house was warmth.

It was Thanksgiving.

Christmas.

Birthdays crowded around tables.

Chicken on the stove.

Sweet corn in a bowl.

Apple pie cooling
where every child could smell it.

It was cold lemonade
in summer glasses,
water drops running down the sides
while cicadas sang outside.

It was her smile.

Lord,
it was her smile.

Warm enough
to make every grandchild think
they were the favorite.

And her laugh.

That laugh would get to the room
before she did.

Fill the kitchen.

Fill the porch.

Fill the spaces
between people.

Before canser,
we visited Grandma
for reasons.

Holidays.

Cookouts.

Good news.

After canser,
we visited Grandma
for Grandma.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I did not know
what colon cancer was.

I only knew
Mama kept saying,

“Let’s go see Grandma.”

The grown folks
started talking softer.

The television stayed low.

The laughter came slower.

Outside,
Ohio was turning.

Leaves gathered
along curbs and sidewalks.

The trees stood still
as if listening.

And there on the door
was that sign.

PLEASE BE QUIET
GRANDMA HAS CANSER

Folks read it
before they knocked.

Read it
before they stepped inside.

Read it
and lowered their voices.

Fall gave way to winter.

The leaves let go.

The daylight shortened.

The wind sharpened.

The sign stayed.

PLEASE BE QUIET
GRANDMA HAS CANSER

Some mornings
I stood staring at it.

Not because I understood cancer.

Because I did not.

I was eight.

I thought sickness
was something people got over.

Like a cold.

Like the flu.

Like scraped knees.

I thought warm smiles
lasted forever.

I thought women
who made chicken,
sweet corn,
and apple pie

could not leave.

But winter
does not ask children
what they think.

Winter comes.

The snow came.

The cold came.

And one day

the laugh was gone.

The kitchen was quiet.

No pie cooling.

No lemonade waiting.

No voice calling us in
from the porch.

Just coats on chairs.

Folded hands.

Red eyes.

Outside,
Ohio stood white and still.

Inside,
everybody whispered.

As if the sign
was still hanging there.

Years have passed.

Rain would blur the marker.

Wind would loosen the tape.

The paper would curl.

Eventually,
the sign disappeared.

But every autumn,
when the leaves begin
their slow descent,

I see my grandmother’s door.

I see my younger cousin’s
crooked handwriting.

I see a word
spelled wrong
and understood perfectly.

PLEASE BE QUIET
GRANDMA HAS CANSER

I walked through the park
where trumpets laughed gold
and children ran sweet
with candy hands
and festival songs
rose bright as banners
through the city air.

Rain came easy then.

Soft little drops,
cool as mercy,
brushing my cheeks
like God’s gentle hand
had found me worth touching.

The trees shouted green.
Grass bowed thankful.
Puddles gleamed
like silver prayers
gathered at my feet.

And I thanked heaven.

But there,
on the amphitheater stage
where applause belonged,
where spotlights should have kissed,
she lay.

A woman
creased in worn layers,
skin weathered like old streets,
body folded
beneath borrowed shelter.

No home
but a tattered tent.
No choir
but storm.
No audience
but passing eyes
like mine.

And rain touched her too.

The same sky.
The same water.
The same gray clouds
breaking open.

But not the same rain.

Mine fell light,
a blessing.
Hers fell heavy,
a bill collector,
a cold hand,
a flood against tired flesh
that had already survived
too much fire
to drown easy.

Two different rains.

Mine cooled skin
and disappeared.
Hers soaked through,
settling deep
in cracked bones
and weary cloth,
each drop striking
like the world
remembering
its cruelty.

While drums kept beating,
her stomach knew
a slower blues.

While dancers spun joy,
her ribs kept time
to hunger.

And I stood there
beneath my fortunate drizzle,
watching ruin wear
the face of a woman
too tired
to curse heaven
or trust earth.

Maybe faith
gets thin
when both God
and man
keep passing by.

Two different rains.

One baptized me
in spring’s sweetness.
One baptized her
in survival.

One made leaves glisten.
One made suffering shine
for anyone willing
to look long enough.

I kept walking,
but her silence
followed louder
than the brass bands,
louder than laughter,
louder than my own dry blessings.

For on that stage
she performed
the oldest blues,

how one sky
can fall equally
and still
land unjust.

Two different rains.

One washed my skin.
One wore her away.

I watched you sleep.

Not the way the night watches
cold
distant
unmoved

but the way a song listens
to itself
being sung.

You slept on your side,
brown skin rising
like a slow tide,
falling
like it trusted the shore.

And I heard you

not in words,
not in dreams I could borrow

but in that low hum
resting in your chest,
soft as bass notes
in a room with the lights dimmed.

Your breath kept time.

A rhythm
I did not want to interrupt,
only learn.

So I placed my hand
along the curve of your back,
careful,
like a bow meeting strings,

and let your breathing
play me.

Low.
Slow.
Certain.

You didn’t know.

Didn’t know
that each rise
told me you were still here.

Didn’t know
that each fall
asked me to stay.

I watched you
the way a man guards something
he cannot replace.

Not out of fear
but out of knowing.

You are not common.

Not the kind of beauty
that asks for attention

but the kind
that quiets a room
without trying.

Easy on the eyes,
yes

but more than that,
you are ease itself.

And anything like that,
anything rare enough
to soften a man
into stillness

ought to be protected.

You turned once.

Slow,
like the night shifting its weight.

A small sound escaped you
not apology,
not warning

just you
being human
in your rest.

Don’t protect me
from your snores.
Don’t hide your turning.

Because when you moved,
I followed

hand tracing
the familiar line
of your back

and you settled again,
as if my touch
was a note you remembered.

And we played.

Not loud,
not for anyone else

just a quiet composition
between breath and skin.

My hand the bow,
your body the instrument,

and that hum
that low, sacred hum

the song only we know
how to hear.

You slept.

And I watched.

Not because I had to

but because
I could not look away
from something so alive
in its stillness.

I stayed there,
listening

learning your rhythm
like it might one day
save me.

And in that quiet,
in that rise and fall

I swear
the night leaned in too

just to hear you
breathe.

This morning, before the sun had fully climbed over the rooftops in my neighborhood, I stood in my driveway and watched my teenage son climb into a car with his grandparents.

It was 4:20 in the morning.

The porch lights still glowed against the darkness. Suitcases disappeared into the trunk. My father in law settled into the driver’s seat while my son slid into the backseat with the kind of sleepy excitement only a teenager can possess, half awake and half dreaming about California.

I stood there waving until the taillights disappeared around the corner.

And I smiled.

In many ways, this is an American dream.

Maybe even more than that.

It is an African American dream.

Not because California is some promised land, but because I know enough history to understand that movement has never been equally distributed in this country. There was a time when Black families could not simply decide to travel across America. A road trip was never just a road trip. It required strategy. It required a map, not just of highways, but of humanity. Where could we stop? Where could we eat? Which town welcomed us? Which town warned us to keep driving?

This morning, my son left home worried about whether he packed enough phone chargers.

Progress sometimes sounds like ordinary problems.

Last night, before all of that, we stood together in our driveway setting off store bought fireworks. Some exploded exactly as promised. Others barely made it into the air before disappearing into smoke. We laughed anyway.

Now it is the afternoon of July 4.

I am sitting at my suburban kitchen table eating vanilla ice cream with a Crumbl cookie broken into it, looking through the patio door at a lawn that probably needs mowed in this ninety five degree Ohio heat. I will probably wait until tomorrow. The grass can wait another day.

As I sit here, I realize this ordinary afternoon is, in many ways, extraordinary.

Not because of the holiday.

Because of the freedom to experience it.

I write this grateful.

There are places in the world where questioning the language of patriotism might cost someone their freedom. There are places where criticism is mistaken for disloyalty, where asking hard questions is treated like treason.

I know I live with freedoms many people only dream about.

I do not take those freedoms lightly.

But I also know freedom should never require forgetfulness.

I carry gratitude.

I also carry history.

Those two things are not enemies.

In my family are men and women who wore this country’s uniform with courage and honor. They served believing that protecting this nation mattered. Their service deserves respect.

In my family are also ancestors who served this country without ever volunteering.

They were enslaved.

They built wealth they would never inherit.

They helped shape a nation that refused to recognize their full humanity.

Both histories belong to my family.

Both histories belong to America.

Both histories belong to me.

Maybe that is why patriotism has always looked different through my eyes.

Not weaker.

Not stronger.

Simply more honest.

I do not have the luxury of seeing America through only one story.

Every July Fourth, somewhere in this country, a politician, an athlete, or a television personality will end a speech with four familiar words.

“God bless America.”

The crowd applauds.

The music swells.

The fireworks begin.

The conversation often ends.

But lately I have wondered if those words were ever supposed to end the conversation.

Most Americans know the song.

Far fewer know the man.

The song God Bless America was written by Irving Berlin, who was not born Irving Berlin at all. He was born Israel Baline, a Jewish child in Russia who immigrated to the United States when he was five years old after his family fled persecution. He would later serve in the United States Army during the First World War. He first drafted the song during his military service, set it aside, and years later revived it in 1938, not as a celebration of conquest, but as a prayer for peace while Europe drifted toward another war.

I have always found that remarkable.

One of America’s most beloved patriotic songs was written by a Russian Jewish immigrant.

The Ku Klux Klan despised the song because of who wrote it.

Today, some of the loudest defenders of that song would likely spend more time debating whether the little boy who wrote it belonged here than celebrating what he gave this country.

History has a way of exposing the stories we choose to remember and the ones we quietly forget.

Even the phrase “God bless America” existed before Berlin’s song. In the late nineteenth century, it was spoken by visitors expressing gratitude for a nation they hoped would live up to its promise. It was not originally a declaration of America’s supremacy. It was a prayer of hope.

Somewhere along the way, we changed the emphasis.

Today, “God bless America” is often spoken as though it certifies our righteousness.

As though invoking God’s name automatically places heaven’s approval on whatever we decide to do.

As though God’s blessing is something we possess instead of something we pursue.

I hope God blesses America.

I truly do.

I hope God blesses every nation where parents tuck children into bed, where grandparents pray over dinner tables, where neighbors care for one another, and where people are simply trying to make it through another day.

A God big enough to create the universe has never seemed interested in belonging to only one flag.

That has always been our temptation, not God’s.

What concerns me is not the prayer itself.

It is what we have allowed the prayer to become.

Sometimes we use “God bless America” like a divine stamp.

God bless our policies.

God bless our wars.

God bless our politics.

God bless our ambitions.

God bless whatever we have already decided.

But that is not the prayer I find myself praying.

The God that some people invoke as approval for our actions is the very same God I ask to reshape our actions.

Not, “God, bless whatever we are doing.”

But, “God, help us become people whose actions reflect Your heart.”

Those are profoundly different prayers.

When Jesus was asked which commandment mattered most, He did not answer with a nation.

He answered with worship.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Then, almost without taking a breath, He added another command.

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus refused to separate love of God from love of neighbor.

Neither should we.

Maybe we have become more interested in asking God to bless America than in asking whether America loves God enough to love its neighbors.

Because if we truly loved God with all our heart, soul, and mind, then our politics would look different.

Our schools might look different.

Our neighborhoods might look different.

Our immigration debates might sound different.

Our concern for the poor, the widow, the prisoner, the refugee, and the forgotten might become less about ideology and more about obedience.

That is the America I hope my son inherits.

Not a perfect America.

There has never been one.

But an America humble enough to keep becoming.

An America courageous enough to confess when it has been wrong.

An America confident enough to learn from people who were not born here, remembering that one of our greatest patriotic songs came from the pen of a little boy who was not born here either.

An America where love is considered a strength instead of a liability.

Outside my window, the grass is still waiting.

Grass does not become healthy because someone talks about it.

It becomes healthy because someone tends it.

Maybe nations are the same way.

Maybe faith is too.

So yes, I hope God blesses America.

I always will.

But even more than that, I pray America learns to worship God instead of itself.

Not its perceived exceptionalism.

Not its place atop the world’s hierarchy.

Not its military.

Not its economy.

Not its power.

Because nations rise.

Nations fall.

Empires come and go.

The Kingdom of God remains.

Perhaps the greatest evidence that God has blessed a nation is not found in its wealth or influence.

Perhaps it is found in whether its people have learned to love God with all their heart, all their soul, and all their mind, and to love their neighbors as themselves.

Maybe that has been the prayer all along.

Liner Note:

I didn’t write this essay because I was angry.

I wrote it because America is celebrating two hundred and fifty years of itself, and I found myself wondering whether anniversaries are meant only for celebration or whether they are also invitations to confession.

Healthy families do both.

Healthy friendships do both.

Healthy faith does both.

I have to believe healthy nations should too.

For weeks, I couldn’t shake four words that have become so common we rarely stop to ask what they mean.

God bless America.

The older I get, the more I wonder if we’ve become better at saying those words than living the kind of lives they ought to require.

It also seemed fitting that this essay would be accompanied by two works from artist, storyteller, and civil rights activist Faith Ringgold, including her piece God Bless America, which serves as this essay’s cover. Ringgold spent a lifetime telling complicated truths about this country without surrendering to cynicism. Her work refuses to choose between love and honesty. It insists that both belong in the same conversation. That is the kind of conversation I hoped this essay might become.

As a Christian, I live with a tension I have stopped trying to resolve.

I have hope because my faith is in Christ.

I am also realistic because I read Scripture.

When I read the closing chapters of Revelation, I don’t come away believing humanity eventually discovers enough wisdom to save itself. I see a world increasingly captivated by power, comfort, self worship, and idolatry. I see kingdoms convinced of their permanence while forgetting that every kingdom eventually answers to a greater King.

That doesn’t make me despair.

It reminds me where my hope belongs.

My optimism has never rested in governments.

Or elections.

Or economies.

Or military strength.

Or whether America celebrates another two hundred and fifty years.

My hope rests in the Kingdom of God.

That hope doesn’t free me from loving my country.

It calls me to love it honestly.

It calls me to celebrate what deserves celebrating while refusing to ignore what still needs healing.

It calls me to remember that asking God to bless a nation has never exempted that nation from God’s expectations.

So this essay isn’t a prediction about America’s future.

It is a prayer about America’s heart.

I hope God blesses America.

I hope God blesses every nation where parents are trying to raise children, where neighbors are trying to care for one another, and where ordinary people are searching for peace.

But even more than that, I pray we become a people who love the Lord with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, and who love our neighbors as ourselves.

Because perhaps that has always been the greater miracle.

Not that God would bless America.

But that America would become more faithful to the God whose blessing it so often asks for.

I wasn’t supposed to spend my Friday at Popeyes.

Truthfully, I only came because there was a coupon sitting in my phone for a free chicken sandwich.

Seven weeks of six-day workweeks have a way of changing your standards. Somewhere between the community events, meetings, phone calls, late-night emails, and mornings that arrived before the previous evening had fully disappeared, “Where should I eat?” quietly became “What’s free?”

It almost felt practical.

Almost accidental.

And yet, sitting here now, I wonder if I was supposed to end up here all along.

The restaurant is clean in a way fast-food restaurants rarely are. The chairs are comfortable enough that no one seems eager to leave. New Orleans jazz drifts through the speakers, soft enough that conversations don’t have to compete with it. The smell of fried chicken hangs comfortably in the room, settling into clothes and memories the same way certain songs do.

Outside, people hurry somewhere.

Inside, no one seems in a rush.

It occurs to me that this may be the first hour in nearly two months where no one is expecting anything from me.

Not a response.

Not a meeting.

Not a decision.

Not another version of myself.

Just a man eating a free chicken sandwich because a coupon appeared at exactly the right time.

Before these last seven weeks began, I remember making a promise to myself.

There will be obstacles.

There will be opportunities.

The obstacles, I expected.

The opportunities, I welcomed.

What I didn’t know was that opportunities don’t always announce themselves wearing joy.

Sometimes they arrive carrying inconvenience.

Sometimes they look like another meeting squeezed into an already impossible calendar.

Sometimes they ask for more patience than you believed you possessed.

Sometimes they arrive disguised as difficult people, difficult conversations, difficult decisions.

Sometimes opportunities leave you wondering why something good had to hurt this much while it was happening.

I’ve started believing that some opportunities are divine precisely because they refuse to feel comfortable.

Grace, I’ve learned, doesn’t always knock gently.

Sometimes it pounds on the front door until you answer.

By the third week, life had quietly become smaller.

Not because there was less life to live.

Because there was less of me available to live it.

There wasn’t enough time.

Or maybe there wasn’t enough energy.

Those are not always the same thing.

Conversations I wanted to have became conversations I’d have later.

Essays stayed trapped inside notebooks and the Notes app on my phone.

Books waited patiently beside my bed, their bookmarks unmoved.

Friends heard, “I’ll get back to you,” and I meant it every single time.

Soon simply became another word for someday.

Rest wasn’t something I practiced.

It was something I admired from across the room.

I hadn’t stopped caring.

I was simply tired.

There is a loneliness inside that kind of exhaustion.

People often understand that you’re busy.

What they cannot always understand is how busyness keeps borrowing pieces of you until there isn’t much left to give anyone, including yourself.

The strange thing about these seven weeks is that they were filled with beautiful things.

Thousands of conversations.

Children laughing.

Community members trusting us with stories they didn’t owe us.

Moments that reminded me exactly why I chose this work.

And yet...

Beauty can still exhaust you.

Purpose can still wear your body down.

Meaningful work is still work.

I think we spend too much time pretending otherwise.

The question that has followed me into this restaurant isn’t whether I accomplished enough.

It is much quieter than that.

Was it worth it?

Not just the work.

Life.

The things we say yes to.

The dreams we refuse to let go of.

The ambitions that slowly ask us to exchange comfort for calling.

The responsibilities we carry because someone has to carry them.

Was it worth it?

I don’t know.

Some days, yes arrives before the question is finished.

Other days, I have to wait for the answer.

Success has a remarkable way of introducing itself with applause while quietly handing you an invoice no one else can see.

Sometimes the cost is money.

Sometimes the cost is sleep.

Sometimes the cost is your peace.

Sometimes it’s family dinners.

Sometimes it’s weekends.

Sometimes it’s showing up for people you love carrying only the pieces of yourself that your work didn’t already borrow.

We congratulate people on their accomplishments without asking what they had to surrender to accomplish them.

We admire outcomes.

We rarely ask about the exchange.

Maybe that’s why we misunderstand one another so often.

Everyone is carrying receipts no one else can read.

A few weeks ago, my daughter asked me why I work so much.

Children have a way of asking questions adults spend decades trying to answer.

I talked about purpose.

Providing.

Responsibility.

Those things are true.

But sitting here now, surrounded by jazz and the scent of fried chicken, I realize there was another truth I couldn’t quite articulate then.

Sometimes purpose costs presence.

Sometimes the very thing that allows us to love people also steals moments from the people we love.

That tension has no easy solution.

Only awareness.

There have been losses these past seven weeks.

Missed conversations.

Forgotten essays.

Rest that never quite arrived.

Moments where people deserved a version of me that wasn’t calculating tomorrow before today had even ended.

Perfection didn’t survive this season.

Balance didn’t either.

Maybe balance was never supposed to.

The last bite of my sandwich disappears before I realize I’ve finished eating.

The jazz keeps playing.

Someone laughs near the counter.

The coupon is gone now.

Used exactly as intended.

And somehow, I think about purpose.

Because maybe that’s what purpose is.

Not something that removes exhaustion.

Something that teaches you why the exhaustion mattered.

When I ask myself whether it was worth it, I realize both words deserve names.

The first it is the cost.

The second it is the calling.

Those two things have never been the same.

The cost changes every season.

The calling doesn’t.

So maybe the better question isn’t whether it was worth it.

Maybe the better question is whether what is asking something from me is worthy of receiving it.

Today, my answer is quieter than certainty.

It sounds a little like New Orleans jazz drifting through a Popeyes on a Friday afternoon.

It smells a little like fried chicken.

It tastes like a free sandwich I almost didn’t stop to get.

And somehow, on the first off day I’ve had in nearly two months, it feels exactly like where I was supposed to be.

Liner Note:

I finished writing this sitting in a Popeyes on a Friday afternoon, eating a free chicken sandwich because a coupon happened to find me before I found lunch. Funny how some destinations choose us.

Today I am carrying more emotions than I have pockets for. Tired. Satisfied. Angry. Nervous. Proud. Melancholy. Frustrated. Worn in the way only a season of saying yes too many times can wear someone. Seven weeks of movement finally gave way to stillness, and I wasn’t prepared for how loud stillness could be.

It’s strange being a writer sometimes. People assume words are the deepest part of you because they’re the only part they can hold. But I’ve learned that words, no matter how carefully arranged, don’t always reach the depth of a person’s eyes. My eyes have carried stories I have never written. They have held grief that language couldn’t organize, joy that sentences couldn’t keep up with, and exhaustion that no metaphor has ever fully translated.

I think that’s true for all of us.

We’re always asking each other for words while overlooking the quiet autobiography someone is carrying in their face.

I’m writing this somewhere between Father’s Day and my birthday, four days away from turning forty-two. Somewhere in that space, I’ve been thinking about the difference between getting older and becoming more honest.

At forty-two, youthful energy has slowly negotiated its exit. In its place has arrived something less exciting, but far more useful: honesty. Honest enough to admit that purpose is beautiful and exhausting. Honest enough to admit that I don’t always know if the cost is worth it while I’m paying it. Honest enough to admit that some days I have very little left to give after giving so much away.

I also know this.

I’m not perfect.

I never was supposed to be.

I’ve simply spent enough years trying to become someone whose heart arrives before his résumé, whose purpose arrives before his pride, whose humanity stays intact even when the calendar insists otherwise.

Today, that’s enough.

There is a Coke beside me growing flatter by the minute. New Orleans jazz drifts through the speakers. The smell of fresh fried chicken still hangs in the air. Outside, people are rushing somewhere. Inside, for the first time in weeks, I am not.

I’m not where I ultimately want to be.

But I have the growing suspicion that wanting and needing are rarely neighbors.

Today, I am exactly where I need to be.

The last five weeks have been busy enough to blur the edges of the calendar.

I counted recently.

Four days off.

Four days off in five weeks.

The rest have been filled with meetings, community events, recruitment efforts, presentations, planning sessions, phone calls, emails, writing, relationship building, and the invisible work that follows you home after the official workday has ended.

The kind of work that sits quietly in the passenger seat while you drive home.

The kind of work that climbs into bed beside you.

The kind of work that wakes up before you do.

A few nights ago, I found myself thinking about the difference between hard and challenging.

Not because I was looking for a lesson.

Because I was tired.

On one of those four days off, I came home from an event and parked in my driveway. The engine was off. The garage door was closed. The house stood twenty feet away.

And I sat there.

For twenty minutes.

Doing absolutely nothing.

Not because I don’t love my family.

Not because I didn’t want to go inside.

But because sometimes silence is the closest thing adulthood offers to luxury.

Nobody needed anything from me in those twenty minutes.

No phone calls.

No emails.

No decisions.

No meetings.

No responsibilities.

Just quiet.

The kind of quiet that becomes increasingly valuable as you get older.

The kind of quiet that reminds you how much of yourself you’ve been giving away.

I am forty-one years old.

Soon I’ll be forty-two.

And while I still have energy, I have also reached an age where my body has become a more honest communicator.

My knees negotiate.

My shoulders submit complaints.

My back occasionally sends strongly worded letters.

Long weeks feel different now.

And yet, every time I feel myself wanting to describe this season as hard, another version of myself interrupts.

A younger version.

A hungrier version.

A scared version.

The version of me that survived the recession.

The version of me that became a father while trying to figure out how to remain financially afloat.

The version of me whose worth was tied tightly to a paycheck because that paycheck represented survival.

I remember those years.

I remember staring at bills spread across a kitchen table.

I remember calculating due dates like a mathematician trying to solve an impossible equation.

I remember robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Then borrowing from Paul the next month.

Then realizing Peter was still waiting.

I remember wondering if my children could somehow sense the fear I carried.

Children are funny that way.

They often understand more than adults give them credit for.

I remember losing jobs.

I remember questioning myself.

I remember lying awake at night wondering if I had failed as a man.

Not because anyone told me I had.

Because somewhere along the way I had inherited the belief that a man’s value could be measured by his ability to provide.

If the paycheck disappeared, what was left?

That question haunted me.

Back then, difficulty wasn’t measured by how many hours I worked.

Difficulty was measured by uncertainty.

By fear.

By survival.

Hard has a different face.

Hard sounds like collection notices.

Hard sounds like overdraft fees.

Hard sounds like opening the refrigerator and mentally calculating how many meals remain before payday.

Hard is carrying a burden while wondering if relief is coming.

I know hard.

I’ve met it.

I’ve lived beside it.

I’ve shared meals with it.

Which is why I am careful with language now.

Because language matters.

We live in an era where everything becomes exaggerated.

Every inconvenience is framed as devastation.

Every obstacle becomes a crisis.

Every challenge is transformed into suffering.

But I’ve become increasingly interested in accuracy.

The truth is that I am busy.

Exceptionally busy.

The truth is that I’ve worked six days a week and sometimes seven.

The truth is that I have only had four days off in the last five weeks.

The truth is that there are still two more weeks before June finally exhales.

And the truth is that when June ends, the pace will likely soften.

Not stop.

Just change.

The community events will slow.

The public-facing obligations will lessen.

The constant movement from place to place may ease.

There may be a month where building replaces attending.

Where planning replaces performing.

Where strategy replaces execution.

The work won’t disappear.

It will simply put on different clothes.

And honestly, that is okay.

Because this isn’t hard.

It’s challenging.

There is a difference.

Today, I get paid to create.

I get paid to solve problems.

I get paid to meet people.

I get paid to imagine possibilities.

I get paid to help connect people to opportunities.

Recently, I found myself on the verge of helping a recent college graduate secure employment.

Good employment.

The kind of salary older folks in my generation would have called good money.

The kind of opportunity that can create stability.

The kind of opportunity that can alter a trajectory.

The kind of opportunity I desperately needed when I was younger.

And I thought about the younger version of myself.

The one sitting at a kitchen table worried about bills.

The one wondering if things would ever improve.

The one measuring his worth against a bank account balance.

That younger version of me would laugh if he heard me complaining about a crowded calendar.

Not because exhaustion isn’t real.

Because perspective is.

He would remind me that there was a time when I prayed for opportunities.

A time when I prayed simply for a chance.

A time when I prayed for work that aligned with purpose.

A time when I prayed for flexibility.

For benefits.

For retirement.

For stability.

For a future.

And now that future has arrived.

Not perfectly.

Not completely.

But enough.

Enough to recognize the blessing.

Enough to recognize the growth.

Enough to recognize that challenge is often the price of answered prayers.

I don’t believe in glorifying exhaustion.

I don’t think burnout is noble.

I don’t think being busy automatically makes a person important.

But I do believe meaningful work requires energy.

I do believe worthwhile things ask something of us.

I do believe purpose has weight.

The difference is that purpose carries differently than survival.

One drains you.

The other stretches you.

One threatens to break you.

The other invites you to grow.

Both can leave you tired.

But only one leaves you grateful.

So yes, I am tired.

And yes, I am looking forward to July.

I am looking forward to a slower pace.

A few more evenings at home.

A few more moments in the driveway.

A few more opportunities to hear myself think.

But until then, I will continue showing up.

Not because the work is easy.

Not because the work is comfortable.

But because I know what hard feels like.

And what I am carrying today is something different.

This is not hardship.

This is opportunity wearing work clothes.

And for that, I remain grateful.

Liner Note:

This piece began with a question from my daughter.

“Dad, why do you work so much?”

The question landed heavier than she intended. Children’s questions often do. They arrive without accusation, but somehow still find the places in us that are tender.

Part of me felt guilty.

As parents, we want our children to know that we are available. We want them to know that when they look up, we’ll be there. And yet, the truth is that sometimes we aren’t. Sometimes work asks for more than we planned to give. Sometimes June arrives carrying enough obligations for three months. Sometimes the calendar fills faster than our capacity to hold it.

These first weeks of summer haven’t been filled with camps and constant activities. There have been afternoons spent wandering the neighborhood, sitting around the house, looking for ways to make a day feel bigger than it is. Part of me wishes I could manufacture more excitement for them. More memories. More movement.

When my daughter asked why I work so much, I told her the truth.

I work so that we can have what we have.

The home.

The stability.

The opportunities.

The little things that become easy to overlook once they become normal.

And after saying it, I found myself extending a little grace to the man saying those words.

Things aren’t lined up perfectly.

They rarely are.

There are still challenges.

There are still sacrifices.

There are still days when I wish I could be in two places at once.

But this season isn’t hard.

It is challenging.

And those are not the same thing.

Every challenge doesn’t require a crash out, even though there are certainly moments when crashing out feels earned. Sometimes the work is simply to find the opportunity hidden inside the obstacle. Sometimes the assignment is to embrace the challenge long enough to see what it is trying to teach you.

Even when that challenge costs time.

Even when it requires patience.

Even when your daughter asks a question that follows you long after the conversation ends.

This piece is about work, but it is also about perspective.

It is about learning to properly name our experiences.

It is about remembering that not every heavy thing is hardship.

And it is about giving ourselves enough grace to admit that while we may not be doing everything perfectly, we are still doing our best.

There was a summer in Virginia that still hums inside me.

Not loudly.

More like a screen door closing somewhere in the distance. More like laughter carried across a lake after the sun has started its descent. The kind of memory that does not announce itself. It simply arrives and sits beside you.

I was seventeen.

The kind of seventeen that still believed sincerity was a strength. The kind of seventeen that thought conversations on bunk beds could save the world. I was working at a summer camp tucked somewhere between heat and holiness. We sang louder than the insects. We told stories around campfires. We swam in lakes that did not ask for our resumes, our politics, or our pain.

For a few weeks each summer, everybody belonged to the same sky.

That is what I remember most.

Not the schedules. Not the responsibilities.

The feeling.

I do not remember every camper’s name. I cannot tell you what our counselor shirts looked like. I have no idea who won the staff talent show.

But I remember the blue M&M’s.

It was my birthday.

I was hundreds of miles from home.

No family. No cake. No front porch. No aunties singing Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” with more enthusiasm than melody. Just pine trees, bunk beds, teenagers, and the particular homesickness that sometimes sneaks up on you when everyone around you appears to be having a good time.

I was not expecting much.

A few happy birthdays.

Maybe a card.

Maybe an extra dessert if the kitchen staff was feeling generous.

Instead, somebody handed me a glass jar.

Inside were blue M&M’s.

Only blue M&M’s.

At some point that summer, I had mentioned that the blue ones were my favorite. I was convinced they tasted different. Sweeter somehow. Cooler. Like little pieces of sky wrapped around chocolate.

I know now that this makes no sense.

The candy shell changes color. The chocolate remains the same.

But that was never really the point.

I liked them.

And somebody remembered.

Not only remembered.

They honored it.

Somebody sat down and sorted through bag after bag, picking out every blue M&M they could find.

Handful by handful.

Piece by piece.

Not because they were trying to impress me.

Not because they were looking for recognition.

Not because they needed a reason.

They simply heard me.

And then they acted on what they heard.

Nobody asked me why blue.

Nobody challenged the logic.

Nobody requested evidence.

Nobody explained that all the colors tasted the same.

They just handed me a jar full of what I loved.

And somewhere between the candy and the kindness, something settled inside me.

I felt known.

Not tolerated.

Not accommodated.

Known.

I think there is a difference.

Tolerance often feels like someone making room for your existence.

Being known feels like someone making room for your joy.

At seventeen, hundreds of miles from home, I did not have language for that distinction.

I just knew I felt less lonely.

Years later, I understand it better.

The gift was never the candy.

The gift was the attention.

The gift was discovering that someone had listened closely enough to remember something small.

And then cared enough to act on it.

I think about that often now.

Especially during Pride.

Especially during a time when so many people are still being asked to explain themselves before they are allowed to belong.

We live in a world that loves an explanation.

Why do you love that person?

Why do you dress that way?

Why do you move through the world like that?

Why do you choose that name?

Why do you speak with that voice?

Why does that thing matter so much to you?

Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught that difference requires justification.

That joy requires documentation.

That identity requires a defense.

And I think about those blue M&M’s.

Because nobody asked me for a presentation.

Nobody asked me to prove why they were my favorite.

Nobody asked me to make a convincing argument.

They simply accepted what I loved and decided it was worth celebrating.

Cool.

Blue it is.

Imagine how much lighter this world might feel if more people responded that way.

I know now that what my friends gave me was not ordinary.

Not everyone gets a jar.

Not everyone gets people willing to sort through the pile.

Some people spend years explaining themselves to audiences that have already decided not to listen.

Some people spend decades shrinking themselves to fit spaces that were never designed to hold them.

Some people learn to camouflage the very things that make them beautiful because they grow tired of defending them.

And that breaks my heart.

Because I know what it felt like to receive the opposite.

I know what it felt like to be seventeen years old, far from home, standing in a cabin holding a glass jar full of blue M&M’s and realizing that somebody had been paying attention.

Not to what I produced.

Not to what I accomplished.

Not to what I could offer.

To me.

That is a different kind of love.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that being loved for your specificities feels divine.

Not your résumé.

Not your accomplishments.

Not your usefulness.

Your specificities.

The strange little things.

The preferences.

The quirks.

The stories.

The details.

The parts of you that could easily be overlooked if nobody was paying attention.

We talk a lot about allyship.

We talk about inclusion.

We talk about solidarity.

And those things matter.

But at their best, they are not announcements.

They are practices.

They are habits.

They are evidence that somebody was listening.

Sometimes allyship is voting.

Sometimes it is marching.

Sometimes it is speaking when silence would be easier.

And sometimes it is remembering somebody likes the blue ones.

I still do not know why they were my favorite.

Maybe they reminded me of open skies.

Maybe I liked standing out.

Maybe they simply tasted better to me, regardless of what science says.

It does not matter.

The point is that nobody asked me to defend it.

They simply loved me through it.

And maybe that is the kind of Pride I keep returning to.

Not the kind built on performance.

The kind built on attention.

The kind that listens.

The kind that remembers.

The kind that notices the small details people reveal when they think nobody is paying attention.

The kind that says:

You do not have to explain yourself to me.

I heard you the first time.

Then quietly disappears into another room and comes back carrying a jar full of blue M&M’s.

Every single one of them picked out by hand.

Every single one saying the same thing.

I see you.

Recently, someone called me a writer.

I laughed.

Not because I disagreed. Not because I was being modest.

I laughed because the words landed differently than they once would have.

For years, I thought writers were other people.

People in biographies.
People with book tours.
People whose names appeared on spines before they appeared on screens.
People who seemed to possess some certainty about what they were doing.

Meanwhile, I was waking up before sunrise to chase thoughts across a page. Carrying notebooks. Filling margins. Writing essays after long days of work. Writing through grief. Through fatherhood. Through questions I could not answer any other way.

Writing.

And somewhere along the journey, without announcing itself, the thing became the thing.

The title caught up with the practice.

I am a writer.

Not because someone finally said it.
Not because a publication validated it.
Not because of subscriber counts, comments, shares, or statistics.

I am a writer because writing has become one of the ways I understand what it means to be alive.

It is how I pay attention.

It is how I remember.

It is how I honor people.

It is how I grieve.

It is how I pray when I cannot find the right prayer.

Lately, I’ve been returning to older essays. Not to judge them. Not to improve them. Not even to admire them.

I’ve been returning because I wanted to visit the foundations.

The early pieces.

The essays written before I knew what this space would become.

Before I understood cadence.

Before I trusted silence.

Before I learned that some of the most important things I’ve ever written arrived quietly and refused to leave.

Those pieces feel different now.

Not because they are lesser.

Because I can finally see what they were building.

I can see a writer learning to trust his own voice.

I can see someone trying to understand community, faith, race, fatherhood, masculinity, grief, joy, and belonging before he had language for all of them.

I can see myself learning that reflection is not separate from the work.

Reflection is the work.

The older pieces do not embarrass me.

They move me.

Because I can see the fingerprints of becoming all over them.

The questions that still follow me.

The themes that still find me.

The hopes that never left.

I can see the scaffolding beneath the house.

And maybe that is what growth really is.

Not becoming someone entirely new.

But recognizing that parts of who you are today have been trying to introduce themselves to you for years.

These essays are not relics.

They are reminders.

Proof that long before I fully claimed the title, the writing already knew.

So if you are new here, I invite you back.

Back to the earlier work.

Back to the first attempts.

Back to the foundations.

Because sometimes the most important thing about where we’re going is understanding what has been holding us up all along.

These pieces are not behind me.

They are beneath me.

Foundation, not footnote.

Liner Notes:

Before you go, thank you.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading these pieces, carrying them with you, and helping create a space where reflection, curiosity, grief, joy, faith, and community can sit at the same table.

As many of you know, your subscriptions do more than support the writing. They help me support people. Sometimes that looks like school supplies. Sometimes it’s groceries, clothing, a cold drink on a difficult day, a college application fee, a book, a meal, or a small act of care that reminds someone they are not carrying life alone.

I never wanted this space to be just about essays. I wanted it to be about people.

And if someone comes to mind while you’re reading this, a friend going through a hard season, a student trying to find their footing, a parent carrying more than they let on, a dreamer who could use a little encouragement, consider gifting them a subscription.

For five dollars a month, they get the writing.

But maybe more importantly, they get a reminder that someone thought enough of them to send a little light their way.

And together, we continue building a community where stories do what they have always done at their best:

Help us find each other.

Give a gift subscription

Good evening graduates.
Good evening faculty, staff, family, friends, and the one uncle who yelled “THAT’S MY BABY” during the invocation before we even got to the degrees.
[audience laughs]

Class of 2026, before I say anything else, I want you to do something for me.

Look around.

No really.
Look around this room.

Look at the people beside you.
The classmates who became family.
The people whose names you may forget twenty years from now but whose kindness saved you on a random Tuesday in October when life felt heavier than your backpack.

Look at your professors.
Look at your parents.
Look at the custodial workers standing in the back waiting patiently for all of us to leave so they can clean up our celebration.

There is something holy about a graduation ceremony.

Not holy in the polished, institutional sense.

I mean holy in the human sense.

Holy because becoming is difficult.
Holy because survival is exhausting.
Holy because some of you dragged yourselves toward this moment one tired breath at a time.

Some of you earned this degree while grieving.
Some while parenting.
Some while battling anxiety quietly enough for nobody around you to notice.
Some while working jobs after class and pretending exhaustion was normal because America has convinced us that burnout is ambition wearing business casual.
[audience applause]

And if I am honest, this is the graduation speech I wish I would have heard when I sat where you are sitting now.

Not the kind that tells you to dream big without acknowledging how expensive dreams can become.

Not the kind that says hard work always pays off while ignoring the millions of hardworking people whose backs built this country while their names disappeared beneath it.

No.

I wish somebody would have stood at the podium and told me this:

Remember this moment.
Turn this moment into momentum.

Because what happened here was not only higher education academically.

It was higher education socially.

Somewhere between dorm room conversations at 2 a.m., protests on campus, heartbreaks, awkward group projects, and cafeteria food that tasted like it lost a fight to seasoning,
[audience laughs]

your world stretched wider.

You learned people.

You learned how grief sounds in different languages.
You learned how joy survives in communities with very little.
You learned how poverty and privilege can sit in the same classroom and still leave carrying entirely different futures.

You worked across cultures.
Across races.
Across faiths.
Across identities.
Across socioeconomic realities.

And that matters.

Because despite what this country often tells us, diversity is not a brochure.
Not a slogan.
Not a corporation adding more melanin to a website while refusing to change the systems underneath it.

Real diversity should transform you.

And what I hope you learned is that this “melting pot” America asks us to celebrate has never heated everybody equally.

The folks at the bottom of the melting pot have always felt more heat than the folks at the top.

Always.

Some people inherit wealth.
Others inherit warnings.

Do not speak too loudly.
Smile more.
Do not make people uncomfortable.
Work twice as hard for half the grace.

That heat has never been distributed fairly.

And now that you know that, now that you have seen more of the world than perhaps the version of yourself who first arrived here years ago, the real question becomes:

What will you do with what you learned?

Because soon you will leave this campus.

Soon you will enter workplaces and neighborhoods and boardrooms where people remember the version of you that existed before this experience transformed you.

And sometimes, if we are honest, even our own communities will ask us to forget.

They will water this experience down into a phase.

They will tell you,
That’s just college talking.
You’ll grow out of it.
Wait until the real world hits you.

And what they often mean by “the real world” is a world where barriers are meant to be protected instead of dismantled.
A world where silence is professionalism.
A world where opportunity belongs to those already closest to power.

They will ask you to phase out the phase.

To return to old language.
Old fears.
Old limitations.
Old versions of yourself that made everybody else more comfortable.

And maybe they do this because transformation can be threatening.

Because when one person changes, it quietly asks everybody around them why they stayed the same.

[audience applause]

And then comes the real test.

What will you do when people ask you to shrink?

Not directly, of course.

Nobody says it plainly anymore.

Instead it arrives through jokes.
Through silence.
Through “you’ve changed.”
Through “everything doesn’t have to be political.”
Through people who benefited from your ignorance becoming uncomfortable with your awareness.

And maybe you have changed.

I hope you have.

What is the point of education if it does not transform you?

I know this because I sat where you sit now once.

Fresh out of college.
First real job.
Making what I thought was good money.

You could not tell me nothing.
[audience laughs]

I had dress shoes that hurt my feet but made me feel important.
An office.
A nameplate.
I was buying lunch without checking my bank account first.
To a recent graduate, that feels like generational wealth.
[audience laughs and applause]

I worked in college admissions.

And one day, a woman came into the office.

Mother of five.
Trying to go back to school.

The college had already quietly decided they were not going to admit her, but they still wanted me to collect her application fee and registration costs anyway. Nearly nine hundred dollars.

Nine hundred dollars that, for her, was not “just an investment.”

It was groceries.
Rent.
Light bills.
Breathing room.

I met with her again.

And instead of taking her money, I showed her financially responsible opportunities through the local community college. Programs she qualified for. Resources she did not know existed.

And she thanked me.

Not dramatically.
Not like in the movies.

Just quietly.

She said,
“I appreciate your help. I didn’t know these resources existed.”

And I remember walking back to my office realizing something terrifying:

Sometimes institutions will ask you to betray your humanity professionally.

Sometimes the job description quietly includes silence.

Later, my supervisor asked me if I collected her fees.

I told him no.

A month later, I was “laid off.”

Now listen carefully.

I wish I could tell you doing the right thing will always feel right.

I wish I could tell you speaking up for people always leads to applause and promotions and inspirational social media captions typed from beach resorts somewhere.
[audience laughs softly]

But sometimes doing the right thing costs you.

I lost my job.
I was out of work for nearly a year.
I fell into depression.
My life unraveled quietly.

There were days I felt embarrassed.
Days I felt angry.
Days I wondered if integrity was just another word people use when they want you to accept suffering politely.

And the loneliest rooms I have ever entered were rooms where everybody knew something was wrong but chose silence anyway.

[audience quiet]

Some people will call your compassion naïve because they abandoned theirs years ago.

Please do not become one of those people.

[audience applause]

Because America is counting on your silence.

America is counting on your exhaustion.
America is counting on your student debt.
America is counting on your desire to finally rest.

America is counting on you to know better but not do better.

America is counting on you to become so consumed with your own comfort that you forget the people sitting beside you today.

America is counting on you to fall in love with a version of the American Dream that only includes you and your family behind a white picket fence somewhere far away from struggle.

A dream where success means escape.

A dream where your classmates become memories instead of responsibilities.

A dream where empathy slowly gets traded in for convenience.

America is hoping to condition you to forget this experience.
To forget these conversations.
To forget these people.

Because if you remember them fully, they become momentum.

And momentum is dangerous.

Momentum changes policies.
Momentum disrupts systems.
Momentum forces people to confront truths they hoped would stay buried beneath comfort and convenience.

That is why forgetting is rewarded here.

Because remembered humanity costs too much.

There is a line from Lauryn Hill where she said,
“How you gon’ win when you ain’t right within?”

And I think about that often.

Because this world will offer you many versions of success while quietly starving the parts of you that made you human in the first place.

Do not fall for it.

[audience applause]

And yes, please make money.
Please.
Pay your bills.
Take vacations.
Buy your mother something nice.
Rest your body.
Eat good food.

But do not become so comfortable that your comfort costs somebody else their dignity.

Class of 2026, years from now this gown will hang quietly in the back of a closet.

The group chats will get quieter.
Some friendships will fade.
Some dreams will change shape.
Life will become heavier than it feels tonight.

But I hope someday, maybe while holding this gown in your hands before moving apartments or cleaning out a closet, you remember this room.

I hope you remember what it felt like to believe another world was possible.

And I hope you turn that belief into momentum.

Not performance.
Not branding.
Not temporary outrage when the internet tells you to care.

Momentum.

The kind rooted deeply enough to survive comfort.
The kind courageous enough to continue long after the hashtags disappear.
The kind powerful enough to remain transformed in a country constantly asking you to forget.

Class of 2026, I am proud of you.

Now go make sure your education reaches further than your résumé.

Congratulations.

[audience rises in sustained applause]

[exits stage]

Liner Note:

I started writing “Turn These Moments Into Momentum” at my niece’s graduation this past weekend, somewhere between applause and protest.

In the middle of the ceremony, students stood and turned their backs toward university leadership in an act of solidarity. Quiet at first. Then loud in the way silence sometimes becomes loud when enough bodies agree to carry it together.

And I remember thinking how beautiful it was to witness young people still believing their voices could move something heavier than themselves.

That kind of belief is rare now.

Or maybe not rare.
Maybe just exhausted.

Still, there they were, standing together beneath pressed gowns and tassels swaying lightly against shoulders, risking discomfort in a place where discomfort was allowed to bloom safely. A liberal arts campus where questioning power is not only tolerated, but often folded into the culture itself. Protest there felt almost symphonic. Protected by numbers. By community. By the understanding that expression itself was part of the educational experience.

And while everybody around me seemed inspired, a quieter thought kept tapping me on the shoulder:

Will it last?

Because history has taught me that America loves a protest right up until it follows people home.

It is easier to dissent when the crowd carries part of the weight for you. Easier to raise your voice when hundreds of voices rise with it. Easier to believe in justice when justice still fits neatly between philosophy courses and coffee shops and late-night conversations in dorm rooms smelling faintly of incense, ambition, and somebody warming up ramen in a microwave that should have retired three semesters ago.

But eventually the ceremony ends.

Eventually the graduates scatter.

Eventually brilliance enters what people love to call “the real world,” which is often just shorthand for a world less interested in transformation than assimilation.

The real world says:
Get in line.
Keep your head down.
Do not make people uncomfortable.
Do not ask too many questions if you want the promotion.
Do not bring all of yourself into the meeting.
Learn how to survive professionally.
Learn how to smile through contradiction.

And sometimes even our own communities ask us to shrink what happened to us in college into something temporary. A phase. A season. A detour before adulthood finally “settles us down.”

As if becoming more aware is something to outgrow.

As if empathy has an expiration date.

As if seeing humanity wider than before is a side effect instead of the point.

Sometimes people want you to phase out the phase because your transformation quietly challenges their stillness. Because when someone returns home changed, asking harder questions, loving people differently, speaking with new language around justice and equity and humanity, it unsettles the rooms that once knew them easily.

And maybe that is what I kept thinking about while watching those students stand together.

Not whether they were brave in that moment.
They were.

But whether the bravery would survive isolation.

Whether it would survive debt.
Whether it would survive careers.
Whether it would survive comfort.
Whether it would survive being the only person in the room saying,
No, this is wrong.

America counts on exhaustion.
Counts on assimilation.
Counts on the slow sanding down of conviction.

America hopes your student debt becomes louder than your compassion.
Hopes your desire for safety becomes bigger than your willingness to disrupt.
Hopes the group chat goes quiet.
Hopes the protest becomes memory instead of practice.

And maybe that is why this speech became the graduation address I wish somebody had given me.

Not a speech about chasing dreams blindly, but a speech about protecting your humanity once the world starts rewarding you for abandoning pieces of it.

I wanted those students to understand that the real test of education is not whether you can recall information long enough to pass an exam.

It is whether you can remain transformed once transformation becomes inconvenient.

Whether you can carry the lessons, the friendships, the late-night conversations, the moments of collective courage, into spaces where courage no longer comes with applause.

I wanted them to remember that momentum is fragile.

And that every system built on silence hopes your momentum eventually gets replaced by comfort.

But I also wanted them to know this:

Sometimes the smallest act of refusing to become numb is its own kind of revolution.

Sometimes remaining soft in a world training you toward indifference is resistance.

Sometimes remembering people fully instead of theoretically is resistance too.

I hope those students remember that moment years from now.

I hope they remember the sound of bodies rising together.

And I hope, long after the tassels are boxed away and the campus becomes memory, they continue turning those moments into momentum within their own corners of the world.

This past Friday, Jaxson Dart stood beside Donald Trump at an event in New York, and the internet responded like somebody knocked over the grill at the family reunion. Folks shocked. Folks disappointed. Folks suddenly revisiting old touchdown celebrations and interviews like detectives returning to evidence they somehow missed the first time around.

And listen.

I am not surprised.

Not even slightly.

The man is free to vote for whoever he votes for. Truly. That is his right. And y’all, he went to University of Mississippi. I mean, I’m not trying to judge nobody, but if I was a betting man, I probably would have pushed a few chips toward the table already. America has patterns. Football culture has patterns. The South has patterns. Sometimes the clues are not even whispers. Sometimes they arrive wearing shoulder pads and gold chains.

But this piece is not really about him.

Not entirely.

And I am definitely not about to leap toward the lazy conclusion that this man is racist or some cartoon villain because of a political affiliation or a photograph. Nope. I’m not doing that. The internet already has enough folks building careers off outrage and assumption.

This piece is for the folks who were surprised.

The people who saw the fade and assumed fellowship.

The folks who heard him rap lyrics word for word and mistook that for alignment.

The people who watched a couple end zone dances, saw a little swagger, a little rhythm, a little cool, and thought, He one of us.

Somewhere along the way, we confused proximity with commitment.

And maybe I have always struggled with that confusion because I grew up in Ohio in the 1990s, in a city where race introduced itself to me early. Not gently either. Race arrived like weather. Constant. Sometimes quiet. Sometimes violent. Always present.

I remember being the Black kid in the white neighborhood.

I remember being called a sellout by Black kids because of where I lived, how I talked, the schools I attended. Meanwhile, some of those same kids would hand white boys honorary Blackness simply because they knew rap lyrics, wore baggy jeans correctly, or danced comfortably at parties. White kids in Black proximity were granted certain privileges as if closeness itself transformed them.

Even then, the math never made sense to me.

And I remember the uglier parts too.

I remember being called slurs in school.

I remember hearing them shouted from passing cars.

Quite often, actually.

I remember the way certain words hung in the air after the car disappeared, like smoke refusing to clear. I remember pretending not to care because boys learn early that pain is something you swallow quietly.

And y’all, I remember the Ku Klux Klan rallying in my hometown. A city of nearly seventy thousand people. This wasn’t the 1960s either. This happened in the 1990s and early 2000s.

That wasn’t history to me.

That was childhood.

So maybe I’ve always been careful about handing out cookout invitations.

Not because I dislike people.

Not because I think Blackness should exist behind gates and passwords.

But because I learned early what Blackness cost.

I knew it before I fully understood the history books.

I knew it in the way teachers watched certain Black boys differently.

I knew it in the way police slowed down near groups of us walking home.

I knew it in the stories elders told quietly at kitchen tables after funerals.

I knew generations before me had already paid dearly for the culture America now consumes so casually. Paid in labor. Paid in dignity. Paid in shortened futures. Paid in denied housing loans, segregated schools, redlined neighborhoods, bent backs, tired hands, and dreams interrupted before they fully arrived.

So maybe I have never been eager to hand over our culture simply because someone can quote Lil Wayne correctly.

Because sports has always been one of the few places America lets white men borrow Black cool without borrowing Black burden.

And Black culture has become America’s favorite buffet line.

Everybody piles their plates high.

The slang.

The rhythm.

The fashion.

The fade.

The swagger.

The seasoning.

But few people ask who cooked the food.

Fewer stay afterward to clean.

And maybe that’s what I know most clearly about love.

Love helps clean up.

I know that sounds simple, maybe even small, but I have lived long enough to know it is true. The people who truly love you do not disappear once the music fades. They do not grab a plate, laugh loud, dance hard, and vanish when the folding chairs need stacked. Real love lingers. Real care stays behind.

I think about cookouts growing up. The way the night slowly emptied itself out. Children asleep across folding chairs. Aunties wrapping leftovers in foil. The bass from old speakers quieter now, sounding tired. Somebody pouring melted ice into the grass. Somebody scraping hardened macaroni from aluminum pans. Somebody carrying heavy black trash bags leaking barbecue sauce down their jeans while mosquitoes kept feasting long after everybody else had gone home.

And the people who stayed to help clean were always the people who loved you.

Not the loudest people.

Not always the coolest people.

But the ones invested enough to remain after the performance of joy was over.

That, to me, is what solidarity should mean.

So before we hand out another cookout invitation based on fades, rap lyrics, proximity, or touchdown celebrations, maybe we should ask harder questions.

Can you help us clean up?

Can you speak up when racism costs Black people jobs, safety, housing, or dignity?

Can you support policies that actually help Black communities instead of merely enjoying Black entertainment?

Can you stay present when conversations become uncomfortable and no longer trendy?

Can you protect Black children beyond reposting highlights of Black athletes?

Can you redistribute opportunity instead of merely consuming aesthetics?

Can you acknowledge the debt America owes to Black labor, Black creativity, Black innovation, and Black survival?

Can you help repair harm instead of quietly benefiting from it?

Because cleanup is labor.

Cleanup is sacrifice.

Cleanup is love without applause attached to it.

And America, for all its appetite for Black culture, has too often preferred consumption over contribution. The country loves the music but not always the musicians. Loves the athletes but not always the neighborhoods they come from. Loves the slang while fearing the mouths that created it. Loves Black rhythm while remaining uncomfortable with Black resistance.

Everybody wants seasoning.

Everybody wants rhythm.

Everybody wants the aesthetic of surviving Blackness without the burden of defending Black people.

And perhaps that is what disappoints folks most. Not that Jaxson Dart stood beside Trump. What hurts people is realizing that cultural closeness does not guarantee moral closeness. That somebody can wear the fade, know the lyrics, date within proximity, laugh at the jokes, and still remain politically and emotionally distant from the realities many Black people face daily.

Because culture is not citizenship.

The fade ain’t activism.

The cookout ticket ain’t solidarity.

The real question is whether you stay once the work begins.

Whether you remain when the grill cools off and the hard conversations start.

Whether you can still love us when loving us costs something.

And if the answer is no, that’s alright too.

Truly.

We still love you.

But this cookout ain’t for everybody.

And you can still hear the music from the parking lot.

I want to say this without armor.
No similes to soften it. No metaphors to make it pretty. Just this:
I love you, brother.

And I don’t mean it how the world trained us to say it, crooked and camouflaged, wrapped in coded gestures and muted affection. Not hidden behind a “what up” with too much bass or a head nod from across the room like love can’t cross streets. I mean it with my full chest. With breath. With all this trembling history still in my voice. I mean it plain.

Because we don’t say it enough. Because some of us never heard it.
And some of us are still waiting for fathers who never learned how to hold sons with anything but rules and rage.

I love you, brother.

Not like a slogan, not like a prayer we forgot the words to.
But like rain. Like wind. Like something that shows up even when nobody asked it to.

Because I know what it means to walk around with a chest full of sirens and no one ever calls for help.
To carry grief like inheritance, passed down like cufflinks or the ability to hold everything in.

We’ve been taught to survive in silence.
To translate pain into posture.
To turn softness into a liability, something that could get you caught slippin’.

But I don’t want to survive like that no more.
I don’t want to be fluent in stoicism and tongue tied in tenderness.

So let me say it loud, so you ain’t gotta whisper it in the dark to yourself just to remember what love might sound like.

I love you, brother.

Because you are not my competition.
You are not my rival.
You are not my op, my threat, my lesson in toughness.

You are a whole damn miracle.
An answered prayer in sneakers.
The reason somebody’s mama didn’t give up last winter.
You are survival in flesh, a song God ain’t stopped humming yet.

And if nobody told you: you don’t have to earn love through performance.
You don’t have to audition for belonging.
You don’t have to bleed just to be seen.

This world keeps telling us our value is in what we carry.
Our usefulness measured in utility.
How many hours we grind.
How long we keep our heads down.
How quickly we bounce back from tragedy, as if resilience is the only language we deserve to speak.

But I’m not interested in loving you for your strength.
I want to love you in your trembling.
In the rooms where your voice breaks.
In the days you ain’t got it.
In the moments you cry so hard your body becomes a prayer.

Let me say it plain:
You are worthy.

Even when your money low.
Even when the job ain’t call back.
Even when your baby mama mad and your father still don’t know how to say sorry.

I love you.

With no add ons.
No disclaimers.
No punchlines to make it go down smoother.

And I’m tired of seeing us in emotional handcuffs,
afraid to hug too long, afraid to care too loud,
afraid to love each other without flinching.

So this is me saying:
You are loved.
You are wanted.
You are needed.

Not because of what you do, but because of who you are.

I want you healed.
Not hustling for scraps of dignity.
Not constantly proving that your humanity matters.
But resting in it.
Reclining in it.
Like a man on his porch in August with nothing left to prove.

We don’t need more soldiers.
We need more softness.
More rooms where tears ain’t taxed.
Where “I love you” don’t get translated into “you straight?”
More tables where we can put our burdens down
and pick up peace like second helpings.

I need you alive.
Not just not dead.
Alive in the kind of way that makes your laugh return to your body
and your smile don’t feel like work.

I want us raising sons who don’t mistake silence for strength.
Daughters who know affection ain’t a weakness.
Families that build their traditions not on trauma,
but tenderness.

Let me say it again.
Let me say it for every Black boy who got told to man up before he could spell grief.
Let me say it for every father who never had the tools but did his best with broken ones.
Let me say it for the homies we lost to pride, to pain, to prisons of their own minds.

I love you, brother.

Not later.
Not when you gone.
Now.

While we still breathing.
While we still got time to turn this love into a language we ain’t ashamed to speak.

So the next time I see you,
no daps, no masks,
just arms wide like a door.

Because this love don’t need camouflage.
It needs a home.

And you, my brother,
you are it.