This is what I told myself, at least. It was comforting to believe that the fate of my body and the bodies of my family were under my powers. “You will have to man up,” we tell our sons. “Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.” This is what they had told me all my life. It was the language of survival, a myth that helped us cope with the human sacrifice that finds us no matter our manhood. As though our hands were ever our own. As though plunder of dark energy was not at the heart of our galaxy. And the plunder was there, if I wished to see it.
One summer, I traveled out to Chicago to see your mother. I rode down the Dan Ryan with friends and beheld, for the first time, the State Street Corridor—a four-mile stretch of dilapidated public housing. There were projects all over Baltimore, but nothing so expansive as this. The housing occurred to me as a moral disaster not just for the people living there but for the entire region, the metropolis of commuters who drove by, each day, and with their quiet acquiescence tolerated such a thing. But there was so much more there in those projects than I was, even in all my curiosity, prepared to see.
Your maternal grandmother once visited us during the pregnancy. She must have been horrified. We were living in Delaware. We had almost no furniture. I had left Howard without a degree and was living on the impoverished wages of a freelance writer. On the last day of her visit, I drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was her only child, as you are my only child. And having watched you grow, I know that nothing could possibly be more precious to her. She said to me, “You take care of my daughter.” When she got out of the car, my world had shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I’d never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival’s sake. I must survive for you.
You were born that August. I thought of the great spectrum of The Mecca—black people from Belize, black people with Jewish mothers, black people with fathers from Bangalore, black people from Toronto and Kingston, black people who spoke Russian, who spoke Spanish, who played Mongo Santamaría, who understood mathematics and sat up in bone labs, unearthing the mysteries of the enslaved. There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. I wanted “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus” to immediately be obvious to you. And yet even in this cosmopolitan wish I felt the old power of ancestry, because I had come to knowledge at The Mecca that my ancestors made, and I was compelled toward The Mecca by the struggle that my ancestors made.
The Struggle is in your name, Samori—you were named for Samori Touré, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often true, escapes our grasp. I learned this living among a people whom I would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not always self-evident. We are, as Derrick Bell once wrote, the “faces at the bottom of the well.” But there really is wisdom down here, and that wisdom accounts for much of the good in my life. And my life down here accounts for you.