Thoughts on Saving the World on A Night When We Could Not Save One Man

There was a time in Texas that execution protocol did not permit anyone outside of the correctional staff to have physical contact with death row inmates. This meant mothers could not hug their sons before executions. I do not know what the rule is in Georgia. I share this short piece in solidarity with the mothers of Troy Davis and Lawrence Brewer and every mother whose son will lose his life at the hand of the state.

Within weeks of finding out I was pregnant, I knew in my heart my child would be a boy. By the time I reached the sonogram in the twenty-fourth week when the sex can be verified, I had already chosen his first name. I named him James for my mother’s third brother and my first substitute father. In the first twenty-three weeks this child and I were forced to have deep conversations that take some parents into adulthood to share with their children. A swirl of troubling genetic tests, faltering hormone levels, cross-country moves, and concerns about the reception of friends, family and colleagues to an unwed pregnancy—even to a woman in her late thirties with two advanced degrees and a room of her own—forced my developing boy and I to have many heart to hearts. I was elated when science confirmed what my heart knew. In less than twenty-four hours that elation would transform into intense worry.

My son was conceived in Texas. A place where my family has lived in relatively the same place for nine generations. Texas is the place where my family’s home and labor and blood are built in the soil. Where their race had for most of those generations determined their destiny. James was also conceived in “the field” or what social scientists call the places where we conduct our research. For just one year I had returned to Texas to immerse myself in this place where my intellectual efforts, if not my body, are always toiling. I visited death row. I attended hearings. I sat next to lawyers who were my teachers and models for how to be a lawyer and the ability of lawyers to change and save lives. I read. I wrote. I conceived a child.

Despite being submerged in the history and sadness of the death penalty, I had not connected that part of my life to the part that was about to be a parent until the day the sonographer said, “it is definitely a boy.” Happiness became worry when I thought about the black men I had met in prisons, jails, and other unproductive places over the years. I thought about how easy it can be for black men to be caught up in a system that does not value their survival or preservation. I thought about the first day he would be pulled over by the police for performing the ordinary task of driving an automobile. I thought about the intra-racial contests of masculinity that have lead to young black men being, at times, their own worst enemy. I thought of how, because he is my child and will surely have my mouth, the public school system will try to pathologize what I know to be precociousness. I thought about my father who only learned the grown up art of parenting a few years before his death with his 14^th child and 3^rd son who was too young at his death to fully benefit from his late maturation. All I could see were the negative statistics on the lives of black men I trade on in my professional life.

If I could save anything with my work, it would be those first hours of elation without the gradual worry for the physical and mental health of the black man in my womb now born. When asked by Nikky Finney what I would save to do the work I do, I thought about that day when modern medicine confirmed what I knew from mother wit. I would save the world, if I could. I would save it for James and all the other black men, women and children, high yellow and pitch black whose mothers have the right to have their burden of worry free from the concern that their children’s blackness will make them vulnerable in ways our arms and love will not be able to protect them.