One of my earliest memories of a poem that really touched me deeply was Mother to Son by Langston Hughes. I really felt like I was that child. I was the daughter that was listening to a mother say those things. And that idea, that concept of life is not easy, life is hard, but we’re still going to climb, we’re still going to make it. All of that is such a foundational concept of my life. I just remember my family struggling deeply financially, really trying to figure out my mother, trying to figure out how she was going to raise these children after leaving my father.
So this idea of what you passed down to your children and the things that she would tell us about our personal family history and then also our history as a people as being black children in this world. I definitely remembered reading that poem. I think it was in the fourth or fifth grade, and I remember thinking, whoa, this sounds exactly like something my mom would say. And it texted me so deeply to have her voice, to have a witness something was bearing witness. I didn’t have the language to say that back then, but when I look back at that, it felt like someone was saying, yeah, I see you. I know I got you, and you’re not alone in this. And we’re all kind of having this conversation together.