It makes me feel like a tornado. A swirling, spinning jumble of thoughts and feelings that only serve to confuse my simple mind and heart. I feel in equal parts lucky and guilty. Relieved and ashamed. Smart and stupid. In some ways, the whole foundation of my existence has turned from stone to sand.
But there is one shining beacon in all of that confusion.
Hope.
I don’t care who I am or what I was. What my circumstances were. Where I was born and into what I was born. I do know that at times I felt hope, and it’s the one thing I felt that has not tarnished or changed or disappeared. Somewhat even beyond my own awareness, hope burned inside my chest, and it’s what I held on to. Hope for what? I’m not even sure. I’m not sure I need an answer, if any of us need an answer. Hope is its own thing, its own entity, its own power. HOPE, all capital letters. As a child, I felt hope; as a newly awakened adult, I felt hope; as a middle-aged man currently, I feel hope.
There is one way in which I think I can define this elusive concept. I believe that much of my hope is made up of this ideal: that our lives take a course in which they someday serve a purpose. I honestly and truly believe that no matter your circumstances, your life experiences can someday lead to achieving a Great Purpose, caps intended, even though our own personal definitions of Great can vary drastically. Also, the vast, vast majority of these Great Purposes will be on an intimate level that only a few will ever understand or appreciate. But that doesn’t make them any less important, any less grand in the schemes of the universe.
I think about my family, both the many who came before and the few who (so far) have come after. Not everyone is born into a loving family, but I was, and I’m eternally grateful for that. Because of this, my family is everything to me. Everything. My parents, my siblings, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins. My wife and children. They are why I exist and why I wake up every morning. Someone wise once told me that the amount you love another person is directly proportional to the amount of pain you can feel when bad things happen to them. I’ve had such pain.
My grandpa died when I was in high school, one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. Shortly thereafter, my very young cousin died in a terrible tragedy. My dad died at the age of fifty-six, and I was only twenty-five. Way too soon. My grandma passing a few years later was a toughie. There was another cousin who died as a child, and then another in her prime. These cousins might as well have been siblings, we were so close.
Death. I’m not unique in having to attend so many funerals, and I know that. But in my life, death has been the biggest source of pain I can imagine (other than a very personal story that is far too intimate to share in this essay). I hate death, and I want someone to hurry up and figure out that whole immortality thing I’ve been reading about in science fiction books my whole life. Come on, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson—anyone, get on it!
But death is a funny thing. Not ha-ha slap-your-knee funny (though sometimes pain can make us do outrageous, inexplicable things), but the kind of funny that means unexpected consequences. With each of the deaths mentioned above, I felt an incredible closeness to those who’d passed and those who were still sticking around. As spiritual an experience as I could ever describe. A power that burned inside me, matching the pain stroke for stroke. And that power was some magical combination of love and hope. As odd as it sounds, the funerals I’ve attended for these dear people have been among the highlights of my life, memories more precious than all the gold and silver in the world. We had no choice but to do it and to hurt from it. But paying our respects, sharing stories, remembering, being together, united in pain . . . I always left a better person than I had been when I arrived.
Family is about hope. Family is hope. I honestly don’t have the slightest clue if that’s true for everyone (though I suspect it is), but it’s true for me, and no essay on the subject could omit them. I have four kids, and all the hope and love that has been bequeathed to me must go to them. They really are the most important, if not sole, purpose of my life now. My success as an author means absolutely nothing if I fail as a parent.
But it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation, does it? Because the second thing that really popped into my head when I thought about this subject was my readers. The amount of hope and friendship I’ve derived from them is beyond measurement. It’s been such a great two-way street, a mutually beneficial relationship that I’m grateful for each and every day. I wrote a few stories that allow them to escape the hardships and drudgeries of life for snippets of time here and there, and they provide me with a constant, steady flow of inspiring tales and laugh-out-loud comments. What a fantastically pleasant surprise this two-way street has been for me.
I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But as a snotty-nosed kid it was more like a pipe dream, like wishing to be an NFL quarterback or an astronaut. Possible, surely, but very unlikely. When I doubled down and got serious in college with my writing, I had some delusions of grandeur (as Han Solo would say). I thought I had to create a masterpiece, something “important,” a book that would win every award and get me an open invitation to Oprah’s house. That didn’t work so well for me. It’s not who I am. I finally went with what I love to read myself and wrote things like The Maze Runner, action and mystery and science fiction. I thought to myself (and I’m not kidding here), Oh well, I’ll never be an “important” writer and change any lives, but I’m having a lot of fun.
It shames me how completely I underestimated the power of storytelling, especially after living an entire childhood in which storytelling affected my life more profoundly than anything else. Getting lost in a story, any story, does change a person. It binds us to characters, makes us feel their emotions and see our own life through a different lens, prepares us for things we may not see coming. Perhaps more than anything else, it simply allows us to escape to another world when our own is too difficult to face for a moment. Maybe many moments.
And these are the stories I’ve heard from readers, stories that have buoyed up my life in countless ways. One new friend had cancer and bonded with one of my characters, pulled from their strength on the page, to get through the terrifying treatments. Others have been bullied or had emotional problems or a mental illness or contemplated suicide and found a safe haven within another world, those created by myself and by many of my author friends. We swap these tales and feel uplifted and enlightened, humbled and inspired. I can say with complete honesty that my readers out there have touched me in much greater ways than I’ve ever touched them.
What does that sound like to me? That sounds like hope. HOPE, all caps.
So again, even now, I’m asking this question: What is my point? I admit this essay has mostly been a stream of consciousness, done purposefully without much planning. (Hey, knock it off. I know you’re laughing and saying, Yeah, we can tell.) I was asked to write about hope, and I did so, trying my best to transfer my thoughts onto the page, translate the things that four-letter word ignited within my mind.
I guess this is how I would sum it up: I’m so self-conscious about living what most would view as a privileged life (again, white heterosexual male raised by a humble but financially stable family) that I became uncertain about whether I was allowed to feel hope. I thought feeling hope might even come across as an insult to those living much harder lives than I do. How dare I talk about hope when I live a nice, neat little life inside my nice, neat little shell. And in many ways, that assessment is correct, and I’m guilty as charged. When there are countless people out there hoping for water, food, or a friend who truly accepts them, the things I’ve hoped for seem trite and borderline offensive.
But I am who I am. I can only promise that I’ve done my best to “pay it forward,” to help those less fortunate, and to make every stride possible to understand things I didn’t as a child. But like any writer and most people, I still think I kinda suck at it and need to do much, much bette
r. Isn’t that a problem we have on any and all levels? I suck. There are a million ways to say it, but we all feel it.
And that’s where HOPE comes in. It’s one of the few things I truly believe we can all share in this world, no matter our makeup or status or place of birth. As I’ve shown, it makes me think of family, both past and future generations, and the strength and love I’ve shared with readers through my stories and travels. It makes me think of working hard to change the world, no matter how small the way in which we do it. It probably makes you think of something in your own life that I’ve never even thought of. But the concept is the same. And that’s my sincere message—my point, perhaps—to anyone out there who might be reading this.
You are not small. You are not insignificant. You are not unworthy. (I can think of another couple of four-letter words to describe anyone who ever tries to make you think so.)
You are great. You are magnificent. You are infinitely important to this world and to the people who come across your path. You are worthy of great things. You are capable of changing as many lives as you so choose, including your own, for the better. There is literally nothing about you, not one thing under the sun, that makes you less than anyone else. If life is rotten, then go and find those people who will accept you and love you and join your quest to change the world. I promise you they’re out there.
Feel hope, my friend, whatever that means to you.
Embrace it, devour it, foster it, make it grow.
Do so, and you will have touched our planet and the people who walk upon it in a way that the eons of infinite time can never erase. You’d be forgiven for thinking I went a little crazy on the cheesy train here at the end, but it’s something I truly feel. Consider yourself hugged by this page of the book, with all the sincerity I can muster.
So go and HOPE the world into submission. And just make sure you have fun while doing it.
DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY
JASON REYNOLDS & BRENDAN KIELY
The Kids Who Stick
BRENDAN: I’ve been thinking about how meaningful it is that we’ve spent the last two years together on a continuous road trip, talking about All American Boys and using it as a springboard to leap into deep conversations about race and racism and how they manifest in the smallest, subtlest moments every day and in the large, institutional systems of injustice throughout our entire society. We’ve traveled to nearly every corner of the country together, talked to people there, young folks in particular, and listened to them tell us about their experiences with race and racism in this country. We’ve seen and heard so much.
JASON: And I wonder, given that we’ve spoken to more than forty thousand kids, teachers, and librarians, and traveled all over, if it all ended today, if we didn’t travel anymore, if we didn’t speak to anyone about All American Boys anymore, after all these kids we’ve met along the way, who are the ones that stick?
B: There are so many. I remember the girl in Philadelphia, where we spoke in front of one of the most diverse schools—diverse in the truest sense—of all the schools that we’ve been to across the country. And after our talk, there was a young black girl waiting for you in the hallway. And her question, in my mind, was a devastating one. But what I witnessed was what I think of as one of the greatest moments of hope because of what you were able to say to her. I’m curious, though, from your perspective, if you see that as a moment of hope.
J: Yeah, I mean, it’s weird because I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about it as a moment of hope until just this minute, actually. But I do think about that moment often. All American Boys was a new book, and we’d just begun the tour. Philadelphia was the second or third stop, and after our presentation, I remember I had gone to the bathroom. And when I came out, there you were, standing at the end of the corridor with this young lady.
I walked up to you and all you said was “She has something she wants to say. I told her to wait for you, because she wants to ask you something.”
So I kneeled down, looked her in the face. I’ll never forget this because of what she said to me, that small voice fluttering with a strange uncertainty.
“Mr. Jason, has there ever been a time where you just wish you could change the color of your skin? That you could be a different color—that way you won’t be treated unfairly?”
Even looking back on it now, that moment, those words hold such magnitude. It was clear that this was something that was obviously very real for her. No matter how diverse her school was, this was something she believed separated her from the rest of her classmates, so much so that she felt the need to ask privately. And in that space, for me, all my mother’s teachings rose to the brim. The cultural codes tethered to me seem to light up in my psyche. All the history and the legacy of what I know to be true, the things I know live in my lineage, the things I know live within my genetics. The things that live historically and continue to metastasize presently, which should not cause us—especially this child—to hang our heads in shame. They all came to the forefront.
This was an opportunity for me to pour into the beauty of who this girl is, the beauty of who we are. That the things that have happened to us and the struggles that we continue to face as people of color in America are complicated. And perhaps they make our lives a little less than easy, but they don’t necessarily always make our lives less than happy. They can make our experiences difficult, but difficulty doesn’t necessarily equate to sadness. And while looking in that little girl’s face, what I wanted her to know was that if she were to go to her grandma’s house and see Grandma singing those songs on Sunday morning, or singing those songs on Friday night when she’s frying that fish, if she were to see the kids on corners in Harlem—kids that look like her—exorcising the weight of the day to only the sounds of their own handclaps (shake a load off), if she were to take a glimpse at Serena and Beyoncé and First Lady Obama, or watch how the mothers make bread from dread, and the old men broken and bent over still iron out wrinkles and put a straight blade to that brown, and walk, strut, with pride, she would know that there is never a reason for her to want to strip herself of such a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful legacy. No matter how difficult it is, no matter how misunderstood we are. Hope is being able to look that young lady in the face and tell her she is gold, and to watch her eyes shine and her mouth curl into a smile in the moment. Then, to walk away from her, certain that I must do what I can to not let the world, and the fear it works to impose, reverse-alchemize her.
And I’ve seen you in these kinds of moments too. All the kids who come up to you and say, “Mr. Kiely, I’m white. And I’m afraid. What do I do?”
B: I find hope listening to the young white people who have the strength of humility. The way they enter into conversations about racism in ways that I don’t often hear adults enter into them. So for example, there was that white kid whose grandfather was a police officer in New York City during the race riots in the sixties.
He walked up to me and said, “I just need to tell you this.” He talked about the violence he knew his grandfather engaged in. He took a deep breath and looked me right in the eye. “Everybody tells me to remember that my grandfather was a hero. They tell me to remember that first.” He was holding a paperback book, and he kept tapping it lightly in his other hand. He looked back down at the ground again until he found the words he wanted to say next. “No matter what good he did, he also did some things that were pretty terrible. I don’t know why everybody else can’t talk about it. I just feel like I need to or I’m living a lie.”
What this kid was trying to process, the courage it took to not take the easy way out as friends and family encouraged him to over and over
, his choice to face the truth instead, to not apologize the ugliness away by masking it in excuses—it’s an honesty most white adults refuse to engage in: that the legacy of racial injustice in America lies within all us white people today too, not as victims, but as the beneficiaries of it. His question was a powerful one.
“I don’t want to be just another person not doing something about it,” he said.
I shook his hand and told him how proud I was of him, how much I admired him. Then I realized he had tears pushing at the back of his eyes, so I asked him if I could give him a hug. I’m not sure who was supporting who there. He is much stronger than I was at his age, so much wiser.
There’s guilt there, there’s shame, and that’s natural. I feel those emotions too. But I admire him because he’s not letting those emotions destroy him. Instead, he’s feeling them and allowing them to motivate him into action. It’s a quality of leadership I admire.
I hear so many people say, “Life is unfair.” Often, adults let that statement sit and resonate with philosophical weight, as if it is a condition of the universe. And while it might be, many young people have a different instinct with which they want to approach it. “Life is unfair,” they say, but then they follow that immediately with, “And what can we do about it? What are we going to do about it?”
Many adults don’t want to rock the boat. “Well, now hold on a second,” they say or intimate. And as we wait, and as we go slow, time passes, and the status quo remains the same. Young people want to rock the boat. And we need to. Otherwise the status quo remains—and our status quo today is unconscionably unjust.
So I believe in these kids. I believe in their leadership.
I’ll never forget the young black man at a school outside of DC. We were presenting in front of the whole high school, and as soon as we break into the Q and A, he stands up to ask a question. But instead of asking a question, he turns to his classmates and says something to the effect of, “If you’re so enthralled with what these two guys are saying, if you think their presentation is so great, why haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying in history class? Why haven’t you been listening to what I have to say?” He took a minute to reiterate what he must have said before, a brief history walking the Movement for Black Lives back to SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and other groups in the sixties.
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