If I spoke to every person on this bus and asked them about their life story, I bet it would be so much better than any fiction that I could write because you wouldn't believe what people have survived and triumphed and seen and done and the grief and the loss and the joy.
In 2009, an old man died in a California nursing home. His obituary included not just his given name, but a long list of the pseudonyms he'd been known to use.
And when you heard more compelling, you understood that to mean that I needed to write about hardship and overcoming trauma or pain, um and something that reflected or talked more about my identity as a black girl, a black girl from Detroit, a black girl from a low-income community, a black girl who was first-generation college.
But there was a kind of corrosive anxiety, I think, about not having more. And you know, in some ways this is a very specific story about one boy who was a fabulist and who died too young. In other ways, I feel as though there are elements of this story that many of us would recognize.
It is our patriotic duty as American citizens and as patriots to help make sure that the American public has access to our history in all of its complexity. And the truth is, is that you can't understand the victories and the triumphs without understanding how far Americans had to push.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
