How is this person - by the way, she’s the only person I know who had direct communication with someone who had been enslaved. Now, if somebody came and paid your rent, you wouldn’t be talking about leaving, now would you?’įor a long time, I couldn’t understand.
And I always thought, ‘ This slavery thing sounds so terrible! How did people survive?’ And she’d say, ‘Child! Don’t be talking ‘bout how bad slavery was! Everybody had a house, a job, and some food to eat. We would go back to her hometown: Pelham, Texas, one of the first communities founded by formerly enslaved people. My grandmother’s grandfather was born a slave, and so he was one of the 250,000 Texans freed on Juneteenth, 1865. And my family has been in Texas since before the Civil War. I’m from Texas and the slaves in Texas were enslaved for two more years. I write about Juneteenth (an American holiday that commemorates the June 19, 1865, announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas, and more generally the emancipation of enslaved African Americans throughout the former Confederate States of America, outside Native American lands). One of the realest prices to freedom is certainty. And I thought we oughta do something about it… we thought we oughta do something about it.Ĭasey Gerald: Sure. And you walk up and down the streets everyday and you see these people who have been left behind and it felt like being back in my neighborhood. Now, that was his opinion, I’m not saying that was what I felt, but we do think that it was very important. There was an upper-class man when I was a freshman or sophomore who said the reason the black community at Yale has failed is that it doesn’t do anything serious. We thought about that Marian Wright Edelman quote, ‘Service is the rent we pay for living.’ You know, there were so many organizations on campus that seemed solely devoted to their own advancement. Secondly, we thought it was very important that each of us use our time and talent to help other people. He has someone he can go to if he has a problem or if he has a question or if he has an idea. We thought there ought to be a place - a safe place - where every boy that comes to Yale at 18 years old feels that he has a sense of community. It came out of very personal pain, not some grand purpose. That was not even a point of contention.Ĭasey Gerald: We were juniors when we started the black men’s union. Everybody where I was from was black: my best friends, my sworn enemies, the mailman, the trashman, the teachers, the preachers, the grocery store owners. I said from ages 8 to 18, I understood ‘my people’ to mean black people. But also, I think it was the first time - and I didn’t have the language for this - that I started to understand intersectionality -like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work. And it wasn’t until I got to Yale that I realized how materially lacking my life had been. We didn’t have our six months’ cleaning at the dentist. What we knew was that we didn’t buy our toys at Toys R’ Us. And I write in the book that ‘poor’ is a word that we didn’t even use. He was sitting in a booth in a crowded diner and he said, “You know, we did a lot of things that we wouldn’t advise anybody we loved to do.” And then I woke up, but I knew what he meant.Ĭasey Gerald: One of the things that made it so lonely was that it was the first time I realized how poor I was.
I couldn’t write for a couple of days, so I took a nap, and my friend came to me in this dream. I was just getting to the stuff in the book, the material where I got to Yale and I got really sad all of a sudden. He came to me in a dream a couple of months after that, and he was sitting in a booth in a diner. And before I finished, one of my closest friends from Yale - who I helped recruit, and whose childhood had been very similar to mine - committed suicide. And so I set out with the book to trace those cracks with words, you know.
And the world was cracked up, too - this is 2016. But I was really cracked up… Not necessarily having a nervous breakdown, but not too far off. I had achieved by my late 20s about everything a kid is supposed to achieve in America. I began it simply because I knew there was something wrong with me. Casey Gerald: Well, it says memoir on the cover, but I really think about this book much more as an intervention.