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

by R. Eric Thomas

The big idea, as I saw it, was this: You don’t exist for a long time. Before you arrive, there are ages, eons—an eternity—without you. (Can you imagine? How boring!) And suddenly there you are. Alive. How you doing? How’s it feel? Immaculate? What if it feels bad? Don’t worry; it gets better, right? But what if it doesn’t get better, it just gets. It just keeps getting. What then? You still interested? You still trying to be good, still moisturizing your T-zone, still working through your stack of New Yorkers, still fighting systemic oppression, still speaking truth to power, still attempting to exist? Still? What if I told you, at another point—fixed, supposedly, but totally unknown—you suddenly, mysteriously, immaculately won’t be anymore? Again. Does that sound like something you want to do?

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.” It seems simple but it’s a bold declaration. How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable? The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.

Don’t do it, I tell myself. Close your eyes, go to sleep, wake up, show up to work on time for once in your life, do a good job, answer all of your unread emails, donate to charity, vote, care about the world, raise a good kid or a dog (tbd), yell at fewer strangers on Facebook, smile more (unless someone on the street tells you to, in which case don’t smile), have hope (shoutout to Barack!) but also be realistic about what you can expect out of this life (shoutout to systemic oppression!), figure out what a realistic expectation for hope in this life is, be a better person, die eventually.

Even from an early age, my parents imbued in us the knowledge that although life wasn’t just, we could always do something about it. We lived, the soon-to-be five of us, in a big house in the middle of a broken-down neighborhood in West Baltimore, lassoed by red-lining and crippled by the drug trade. My parents’ pleas to elected officials and city agencies, about everything from broken streetlights to increased police presence near open-air drug markets, were constant. Sometimes they got a response, sometimes they didn’t. But they were relentless because they were trying to create the world that they wanted their children to live in.

When the weight of it all threatened to overtake her, my mother, with a lightness, would sigh, “There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland.” It became a relief valve, a code word, a cry for help. It also served as a guiding metaphor. The world outside was troublesome, but the house and the world my parents built for us within it was a bubble. A delicate, permeable utopia.

I am willing to entertain the idea that there are many kinds of poverty, that your mortgage can be paid on time and your children can be fed and you can still live in Poor America.

Though we couldn’t necessarily afford the resources that some of my classmates’ families could, my parents used everything at their disposal to expand the walls of our bubble. They filled our home with new experiences and ideas; they took every opportunity to expose us to the worlds outside of our neighborhood; they told us about the things they couldn’t yet show us. They crafted new spaces inside our minds and our imaginations just waiting to be filled up with details and experiences.

As they prepared me for the world, they prepared the world for me, one difficult decision at a time. And it’s a world that’s complex and misshapen and poised for discovery and ripe with promise. I look back and I can see the dreams they had, glimmering and evanescent and steely and diffuse, forming a trail from the place where we started to the place where we are, and the place we hope to be. And I know what it means when they sigh, “There’s never any trouble here.”

Years later, I would learn about the work of Dorothy Porter, the Howard University librarian who devised her own classification system for library materials. In the 1930s she began building a collection of books by black writers and volumes on black and African history that would eventually become Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. At its inception, it was an anomaly. In 1995 she told The Washington Post, “When I started building the collection nobody was writing about blacks in history. You couldn’t find any books.” As her collection grew, it became apparent that Dewey reified the same sort of structural inequities that kept black history out of books and black books off of shelves. In Dewey, she said, “they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had another number—325, as I recall it—that mean colonization.” The result, she explained, was that many libraries were reaffirming a Eurocentric mindset by filing any- and everything about black life under these two categories. Porter’s system, like the Dewey, classified work by genre and subject but included black authors and black history in every area.

This is absolutely fascinating, and I feel terrible that I knew nothing about that history. My elementary librarian (a dear friend of my first grade teaching mom) taught me to use the card catalogue and the Dewey decimal system. I remember him saying something about there being flaws in the system, but he didn’t quite touch on them. In my mind, this is what he meant.

“I’ve been thinking about my mom. I’ve been thinking about how happy she would be for me. I’ve been thinking about how I don’t want to do this great thing without her being able to see it.”

This. Yes. Every single day, this.

Isn’t that the prevailing narrative for people in oppressed groups of all kinds: your ancestors suffered so you could achieve, so you better achieve.

Is there such a thing as internal validation? I know we’re not supposed to hang our hopes on external validation. “Love yourself!” everyone says. “Or at least like yourself. Tolerate yourself!” But a lot of the time, being told that everyone else—or anyone else—finds worth in you carries more weight than telling yourself that you’re worth it.

The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste. It seeps in slowly and easily; it never seems unusual. Isolation presents as an undesired state but nothing serious, nothing permanent, until the lonely nights become lonely months. Community goes from being a distant goal to a forgotten idea.

As a family, we were sometimes quiet, sometimes funny. We didn’t mind silence, even though most of us were talkers. We had the easiness that comes from knowing the same stories and knowing which parts you’re supposed to say at what time. I often wonder who the audience is for those stories, the ones everyone gathered has heard every year, the ones most of us lived through. Maybe they’re not for anyone outside of the circle. Maybe the telling is the metronome by which we set the beating of our hearts.

We don’t expect other humans to act sanely or with any sort of grace when they perceive scarcity, so it’s foolish to expect kids to. Perhaps this is where they learn it. Perhaps the yearly tradition of American children tearing across the White House lawn, dodging and diving over their peers, trying to snatch up as much as they can, is a metaphor itself. Or a precursor.

There is a moment, when things slide back to the more serious, that we feel a little guilty. Who cares about our little joys in such a time as this? Aren’t there more serious things to talk about? Have we called our senator today? I always feel weird about thoughts like that. In such a time as this, shouldn’t I be more serious? In such a time as this! (As if time is ever anything but serious and potentially grave.) I think it’s important to revel in the small things that make us joyful, to indulge when possible and not problematic, to steal laughter and hoard it.

I write letters and commentary to stake a claim for the things I believe in. I vote. I march. I tap-dance for justice. And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.

The possibility of changing the present is never so alluring as when it comes about by changing the past. There’s a certain poetry to time travel. In the place of the hard, incremental work of effecting change in reality—calling your senator, voting, drinking detox tea, and then waiting—you get to see your impact appear in an instant, fully formed, functional, for better or worse. You get to find out how it ends. You get to see time unspool before your eyes and then knit itself back together again, hopefully better, hopefully brighter, hopefully overflowing with cheese groves.

The thing is, a catastrophic end to the world as we know it sounds like a lame experience. I am not interested in the least. It’s scary, yes, but mostly dumb. And the way we’ve been taught to think about it is so improbable. We are not going to band together and listen to a bunch of scientists to save humanity like Jake Gyllenhaal in a disaster movie. Sorry. You know how I know? Because a bunch of scientists are telling us how to save the world right now, and half the world isn’t listening to them.

Prophetic words published in 2020 prepandemic.

You’re exactly who you need to be. Each of you. It may not feel like it; it may seem like it would be much easier being anyone else. You may look back at the person you were at one point and wish that you could instead be the person you are now at that far distant, unreachable point in the past. But you had to be who you were to get to who you are. Every page in the story is successive; they’re all numbered and bound like a book.