Beloved, the hope that I owe you — the hope to which you are entitled — is not something I can cloak in gossamer metaphor. I cannot paint you the Pangaea that all parents feel they should.

But neither will I speak to you as though the very sky is a fraud, as though our lives are a set breaking down, are a studio lot in foreclosure. There is no walking away from this, as we would from a dimly lit theatre at the close of a sobering film. 

We are real. And for now — just for now — we are still alive. 

When the time comes, we will not speak of expectation. I will tell you what happened to the lanky boy down South, taking the shortcut to a home after dark in what once was a sundown town. It will be more than a familiar narrative, even the first time you hear it. It will be an ancestral refrain; it will moan from within your own marrow.

I will tell you: at the moment when his murderer was acquitted, I did not hold you closer, as many black parents do in these seminal moments. I did not hold you at all. For a moment, my arms would not lift. For a moment, you were all but alone. You were smiling, your dark eyes dancing with gorgeous mischief, as you held out a box of Teddy Grahams you weren’t supposed to have.

Distracted, I poured you more than a handful. I poured you all that was left.

The murderer smiled when he heard he was free and his lawyers boasted of their own legal prowess. They preened and grandstanded like heroes. They clucked over how long it took for the murderer to be granted his freedom and surmised that he would never have been charged at all if he were black like the boy that he killed.

The State Attorney also smiled, as she had many months ago, when the murderer was in fact arrested — 45 days after he left the boy dying in the grass, of a gunshot wound to the heart. I remember her then and how she basked beneath a press conference halo, being alternately terse and coy, playing to the rafters with actress’s affectation. “Those of us in law enforcement are committed to justice for every race, every gender, every person, of any persuasion whatsoever. They are our victims,” she’d said.

I recall the “our” clearest of all. (Few words, you’ll learn, are more disingenuous than “our” when a black child has died in the street and black folks begin to understand that the law will not hold his killer accountable.) 

Last night, before I could reanimate enough to embrace you, I watched the State Attorney grin again, just after she chastised all the parents and advocates and media — both social and mainstream — for raising our voices loudly enough to force an arrest in the first place. “For a case like this to come out in bits and pieces served no good to no one.” 

Here is all that you should know: we are the only our there is. There would be no case for her to concede had our bits and pieces not been lain at her feet and then cobbled together to give voice to the gun-silenced child. 

No, I will not speak to you of expectation. Expectation of any protection at all feels an increasingly empty enterprise for black mothers. But I will find the hope I owe you. It will be communicated with candor, not fear. I will stoke it with dreams of an imagined eternity, where every man gives answer for every of his actions. I will build it, floor up, in communities constructed with care and by choice. We — you and I — will get through this, together. We — us and our own — will invite the bewildered to join us. And when we have amassed enough hope to shore us up, we will run toward this behemoth, which cradles in its bottomless belly a legion of unavenged black bodies.

If we die, we won’t do it afraid. We will do it while standing our ground.