Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.”

When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.

There wasn’t, and isn’t, a wide spectrum of ways a black man could express himself—his beauty, his pride, his love for his own being—in the spaces I passed through. This came from centuries-old external pressures on him, namely the presumption that he was a savage and therefore not actually a man at all. Having a strict understanding of how a black man operated in the world kept us safe. As someone whose deviations from that model were always clocked by others, I understood that.

When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.

Do you ever worry that, given the opportunity, you’d help to usher in a terrible world to save your own skin or to provide for your loved ones? Everybody thinks they’re the time-traveling hero, but deep down do you ever think, Actually, though, I would totally murder Katniss Everdeen if it meant I could eat well forever?