I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother.
I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.
And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children’s children.
Baldwin wrote the letter in 1962, at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. In its brief pages, it told a story of how American history tested your capacity to love. How it made you love less, hate more. How hate made you lose your sense of self. Hate worsened and deepened your feeling that you did not belong. But you did belong: For this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it….you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.
I showed Patrick the letter we would read in a few days.
“What’s the title?” I asked him.
He read, “?‘My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.’?”
“And what’s emancipation again?” I quizzed.
“Getting rid of slavery,” he said, and I nodded swiftly.
“And what do you think black people most wanted after emancipation?”
Patrick guessed easily. “Power, money, respect, land.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes. Land, especially. Do you think they got it?” I asked.
He knew the answer. “No.”
I set aside the next couple of days to talk about history.
“After the Civil War,” I said, “the U.S. government set up this law where you could apply for land at an office in Little Rock. What do you think might have gone wrong?”
Patrick guessed again, this time answering in the form of questions: “How you going to get all the way to Little Rock? How you going to know about the land if don’t no one tell you? They probably don’t believe it; it’s a trick. And that land’s valuable, people going to steal it.”
I agreed. “You needed to own a horse or to pay for a ride. There was corruption, and people took bribes to give it away.” In the end, only about 250 black families in all of Arkansas got land.
Guiltily, I skipped through major world events of the next hundred years. I wanted him to examine a book that had large black-and-white photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. I said we needed to figure out what was happening in 1962, the year Baldwin wrote the letter to his nephew. Baldwin had been in a different country, in France, but the Civil Rights Movement had brought him back to the United States. He’d wanted to visit the South.
Patrick examined the pictures. In Mississippi, white mobs at Ole Miss were burning and breaking everything in sight. They were angry because they didn’t want this guy—I pointed to James Meredith—in their classes at law school. We digressed about Meredith. He wasn’t afraid. He pledged to walk a hundred miles across the Delta, starting in Memphis and ending in Vicksburg. He started the walk. A sniper got him on the second day.
“Did he die?”
“No. He was struck; he fell down. But he didn’t die. And he got to law school eventually.”
He paused. “You say James Baldwin came here?”
“Yes. Well, not Helena exactly. But parts of the South.”
“He came back to see his family?”
“No, he’d never lived in the South before.”
Patrick looked incredulous.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Maybe you would.”
“No.” He shook his head.
“Well.” I gave him his homework: to read Baldwin’s letter.
—
PATRICK WALKED THROUGH the doorway, holding up the book in the air as if it were a medal he’d won. “It’s real,” he said. My heart surged: So finally it could be this easy. You give the person a book, he reads it, he’s moved; after a certain point you can just be a delivery woman, a conduit.
Patrick sat down and immediately, without bothering to wait for me to ask how he was doing, wanted to show me his favorite line.
“You must accept them and accept them with love,” he read. He explained what it meant to me, in an authoritative, almost didactic way. “This mean that after slavery and segregation I got to put my pride aside and say it’s okay. James, he be talking about real love. Real love be like a mother has for a child. She don’t love you because of who you are; she loves you because she loves you. He want that kind of love to be everywhere; he know that love grow when you give it. We got to be bigger, we got to be greater.
“This real, Ms. Kuo,” he repeated. “He be writing to a nephew—I got a nephew, too. Really, it just make me feel better about, you know, being black.”
I felt like celebrating at his expression of racial solidarity. I nodded eagerly, not hiding my pleasure.
“What’s your favorite line?” Patrick now asked me.
“It is the innocence which constitutes the crime….For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”
He agreed it was a good line. “What does this mean to you?” I asked.
“It’s deep, it’s no joke. I think what it means is, white people don’t know our history. Or don’t understand. It’s deep—he don’t just say white people be evil, that they be lying. He just saying they don’t know because they don’t want to know, so they ain’t going to know. Maybe this is why a lot of black folks give up in life.”
“And why is that a crime?” I pushed. “To not know?”
“It’s like we black people are kinda left behind. So for them not to know, not want to know, that be coldhearted. Because when James say, For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it, that remind me of Douglass, how Douglass say this be our home, too. So thank God for Frederick Douglass; thank God for people like them protesters. Thank God he fought; thank God they fought.”
At this Patrick halted, doubting himself. “But the truth is that even when we be thanking them, they be stressful to think about it. People don’t want to think about it. Like when James talk about white people, how they be fleeing from reality. For me, it ain’t just about them, it about us. Drinking, getting lost, getting high, trying to forget, being confused—we want to forget, because we don’t want to know about slavery, about our history. It real; it painful; it stressful. It unbelievable. But the only way we gonna overcome it is by thinking about it.
“I don’t know nothing about slavery, Ms. Kuo, but I can tell you about my life. I really got so many problems. I can kind of figure out that my life is hard, but I just don’t know how hard. I only know what I know. I can compare it to yours and say, Oh, this be harder than yours. But compared to a slave, my life is easy. And compared to white people, I don’t know, because I don’t know really anybody white, so how can I talk about them?”
His voice had grown soft so gradually that the silence now didn’t seem strange.