My 82-year-old mother says to me “Daughter, I feel like my feelings are in suspension.  They can’t go much lower and I don’t see anything out here that will make them rise any higher.  I’m just numb.”  I wish I could hug her but I remember non-essential travel is not a possibility right now.

I ask, When is a hug deemed essential enough?  

My sister-in-law calls from Minneapolis and says the men in her life - my brother, her sons - are feuding about the role of history in these demonstrations.  I tell her I understand each generation’s need to be “right” and their journeys appreciated.  But silently I wonder about the stubbornness of the old and the brashness of the young.  No matter the age, a hurt child will holler. And right now, to be black in America is to holler.

I ask, Are we hollering loud enough to finally be heard?

I found myself this week explaining to “woke” white people why my skin requires a hypervigilance just to visit the Target store, where security tags me with their eyes and often circle me with their feet and the “Karen’s” pull their purse tighter in case my shopping cart brushes too close to theirs.    

I ask, What is the cost of shopping while Black?

Then a white theater colleague says it never occurred to him that black work has such a different scrutiny.  I remind him of the egregious criteria often used to evaluate black work for production – is it universal enough? Translation – is it too black for our subscribers?  And still, while decidedly black, I’m claiming the title and the responsibility of being a playwright sharing “human” stories.   

I ask, Is racial indifference or bias my responsibility to understand, defend or to stop being so “sensitive” about?

And then there’s my daughter who sets out for a jog but asks me first about wearing a baseball cap – “can you tell I still look like a girl?”  My beautiful child is afraid to run in her own neighborhood. Yesterday, my other daughter goes to the protest in Eastern Washington but said she and her friends left early because the white supremacists “were on their way.” Today, she phones after being called a nigger while helping the looting cleanup downtown. “I just want a day, Mom, where I’m not afraid, where I can feel safe.” And then she weeps.

I ask, How do we protect our children and arm them with enough faith to negotiate the world in which they find themselves?

Today, we have all been delivered to grief’s door or find ourselves kneeling at the mourner’s bench but there is joy to be revealed and hope to be had. We will persevere. We can all be stewards of change. In times like these, I seek out the wisdom of the masters….

• "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal." - Toni Morrison.
• “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” -  James Baldwin.
• "Nobody's free until everybody's free. "When I liberate myself, I liberate others.” - Fannie Lou Hamer