Why I Wrote an American Story

Since the early 1990’s, when this memoir was a few short autobiographical essays I had no plans to expand upon, I have always thought of it as titled Daughter of the Great Migration. After years of introspection, it had become clear to me that everything important about me--the live I’ve lived, the person I’ve become, the choices I’ve made, the things I believe, all my faults and virtues--is due to that aspect of my makeup. I will always understand myself as the daughter of Jim Crow sharecroppers descended from slaves.

Unfortunately, no one, and I do mean no one, on the publishing side of things liked that title. Not even a little bit. So, I deferred to their wisdom. As the final production deadlines loomed, my book remained title-less. Neither I nor my editor could figure out what to call this pile of pages, though emails ricocheted back and forth all day with offerings each of which the sender thought genius but which the recipient thought ridiculous. Our deadline looming frighteningly near, we barricaded ourselves in his office and pored over lists of gospel song titles. We thought that our surest best, given the centrality of religion to my upbringing and the seminal, albeit non-traditional, role it came to play in my psyche. But nothing fit (Billy Graham had already snagged the most fitting one: Just As I am). We were getting nowhere.

Stymied, we moved our deliberations from his office to a local restaurant and found the missing ingredient that made short work of our creative impasse: martinis. As we argued back and forth about the central message of my book, we parsed it for its central themes: assimilation, culture clash, tradition versus modernity, societal and personal transformation, identity creation, the price of success, family dynamics. We kept coming back to its encapsulation of a particular junction of crossroads in the American story, the place where the Great Migration meets the Civil Rights Movement. The moment he blurted out, "It’s a quintessentially American story," we knew we’d found our title. Snooty-writer me still prefers Daughter of the Great Migration. Levelheaded-me, however, knows that An American Story universalizes the black experience while Daughter suggests that it’s not a tale all Americans should, or could, relate to.

The two questions people keep asking me are: why I wrote this book and what I hope readers will glean from it. I wrote the book because I survived long enough and successfully enough to finally understand the perilousness of the path I had journeyed. Not the physical dangers, which were few, but the moral and psychological dangers, which were legion.

When I was younger, I thought that-—my survival and my success-—had happened because I was better, smarter, worked harder, was more morally fit than other people from similar backgrounds. But the longer I lived, the more I came to understand how incredibly fortunate I’d been. Not special, not harder working or more deserving-—damn lucky. What set me apart from other striving blacks was having attended a gifted elementary school and having a strong family structure that kept me from disappearing into the ghetto’s many traps. I didn’t get pregnant (too nerdy; boys didn’t approach me). I didn’t try drugs (I took everything so seriously, I thought Reefer Madness was a documentary) and too timid for crime. I loved school, avoided debt, and contracted no illnesses we couldn’t afford.

The ghetto is full of kids just like me. Most you’ll never hear of, though you’ll vote for politicians and programs that worsen their suffering. You’ll never hear of them because most will fall into those traps, the one plentiful thing in the inner cities. They’ll graduate valedictorian but learn that their ghetto education far from prepared them to compete at mainstream universities; they’ll "choose" to drop out mid-way through spring semester. Or, they’ll cut high school a little too often, end up in night community college but "choose" to quit to take a second job or when a relative needs nursing. A teenaged decision will ruin the rest of their lives because poor families can’t afford second chances. Maybe they’ll queue up for municipal jobs that crush their souls but pay the rent. Perhaps they’ll have a wreck and get sued because they "chose" not to carry $1200 a year liability insurance. Lacking the ability to envision a future much different from their present, they might fall in love, marry and reproduce early. Why not?

This is a cold, cruel world to be born into poor, black and female. I wasn’t supposed to make it. Important people were never supposed to hear from me, at least, not unmediated by well-educated political actors or think tank liberals with their own agendas. Well, now I am a well-educated political actor and a think tank liberal, but one with a well-worn ghetto pass. Survivors can never shut up about the thing they survived-I’m no different. That’s why I wrote the book, because I want everybody to give a damn about struggling poor folks and the role the well-off play in their continuing travails.

What should you readers get from it: an understanding that I’m not special. The least investment in poor kids, done on a societal level, could work miracles. No, not miracles. Ordinary lives of decency, fulfillment and good citizenship. When you stigmatize a segment of the population and make clear that they are not part of the polity, except as national problems, they will behave accordingly. Underachievement, at best, and sociopathology, at worst, is the order of the day when entire groups are marginalized. We need to change our ways.

That’s why I now believe An American Story to be the perfect title. Its long past time that blacks cease to be seen as "failed" Americans. America wouldn’t be America without our three hundred years of unremunerated labor, our art, our cuisine, our ineffable coolness, our military elan; no one’s more American than we are. No one’s suffering, no one’s triumphs, no one’s longing to live the American dream is more intertwined with the heartbeat of this nation.

I want people, blacks included, to understand that the black success story is not me. It’s not Colin Powell. It’s not Oprah Winfrey or Mae Jemison. It’s the millions of hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying poor blacks who get up every morning to face another day that ought to drive them to crime or to nihilism, but doesn’t.