A Letter to My Daughter (2022)

Why write a letter to you, and why still after so long, so much having changed?

It was 2004. I had recently moved from Oregon to Mississippi to attend graduate school. I noticed S. during orientation, and seeing her, meeting her, changed my life. Over the following weeks we talked easily, endlessly. One afternoon, S. came to see me at my studio apartment, her four-year-old daughter, E., in tow. E. proudly demonstrated her somersault skills and the two of them looked at my books, thumbing through Picasso on the floor. It was impossible not to love S., and so to love them both.

“All that you touch, you Change,” wrote Octavia Butler. “All that you Change, Changes you.” Everything in my life has changed me, some things indescribably and fully, such as my love with S. We were a world. Yet nothing changed me as immediately and definitively as becoming a parent to E., that oath. In his book-length letter to his son, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the paradigm shift of becoming a father: “Everything that was past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after.”

This is a repost of a letter to E. that I first published in 2022, the letter which led to this larger project of public letters to private people. After E.—you.

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Dear E,

I need to finish this letter to you, as I’ve been writing and sitting on it far too long. Six years. I told my writing students this fall semester that I was going to finally finish this letter. I had assigned them to read James Baldwin’s open letter “A Letter to My Nephew,” and asked them to write open letters of their own. I like writing alongside my students. They turned in their letters months ago, letters to brothers and sisters, to people who have hurt them or people they are estranged from, letters to young people they have mentored and people who are gone that they desperately miss. I am still not finished with my letter. I have done this before with other classes, promised to finish this letter while students wrote their own. I haven’t finished much writing in recent years, have published almost none, while in those same years you have written much, have finished high school, graduated from college, started two literary magazines, worked on state and national political campaigns, and begun law school, an impressive list that barely scratches the surface of who you are. Over this time I have tried writing this letter to you about so many things: stepparenting, chosen families, queerness, mental illness, family, art, love. But I malinger, or I doubt that I have anything to say to you or anyone about anything, think that maybe it’s not a little embarrassing and shameful I am presumptuous enough to imagine that I might.

Baldwin began his 1962 letter to his nephew by explaining how he rewrote and threw away the letter multiple times as he tried and failed to get it right. Perhaps the problem was writing anything at all in the face of how much what he wanted to say meant to him, or just the weight of feeling. I’ve been trying to accurately get my thoughts into this letter to you for six years now, and I’m still not sure that I have figured it out or ever will, though sharing with you who I am and what I’ve seen has been of singular importance in my life. Hopefully the years of not writing in public, to you or anyone, somehow mattered, maybe in the way Adrienne Rich wrote about in her poem “Cartographies of Silence” — “Silence can be a plan / rigorously executed // the blueprint to a life.”

On November 14, 2016, the first draft of this letter began this way:

Last night as we watched episode 5 of Luke Cage on Netflix (me rewatching the episode, you for the first time) and as we talked some about what we were plan[ing] to write […] it felt much more clear then, last night, as to what I would be writing to you here now. We decided to write each other letters as a form of activism, bridging the progressive generational divide, the gender divide, all the divides all over the place. That I would write you, my 16-year-old stepdaughter, a letter for you to respond to. I would write something about my own failures and fears, about what I’ve done wrong, about how I think of my daughters and family and friends and strangers in the contemporary political landscape, something to get a conversation going, using our own letters — our own dystopian anxieties and utopian dreams — as a launching off point for…well, something. I suppose we never got to that. Or we just knew that the starting of something was, well, something. That that was all we had right now to give. Or that we had it to give. How we, two Americans from different births, educations, experiences, and desires, try to see things.

But now, writing this Monday morning in my campus office, feeling very white, very privileged, very cocooned in convenience and goods, in easy access to energy and heat and lines of credit, I’m wondering what if anything I have to say.

You know of course how in March of that year your mother and my decade of marriage ended, and perhaps you know that I was drinking a lot then and having difficulty sleeping. To say that year was a turbulent time in America is more than understatement, and I was likely not alone in my difficulty distinguishing personal anguishes from our shared public and political ones. You were a junior in high school then; your sister was six years old. The house we lived in, the only place we had called home in Pennsylvania — a brick two-story, three-bedroom house on a corner suburban lot, with a swing set out back that a neighbor and I had put together, next to a garden your mother tended every spring and summer — other people now call home. In the years since, your sister has had five other homes, and you have had seven.

Why write a letter to you, and why still after so long, so much having changed? That 2016 evening when our idea to write these open letters to each other came up, the country was beginning to shift from one president — our country’s first black president, a man you watched perform in a 2008 Democratic debate, staying up well past your bedtime, and, so moved were you by what he said and what he represented, you later fundraised for him, built a lemonade stand with a friend and mailed in what little cash you raised along with a letter typed on your mother’s old typewriter — to a new president, a white man in the worst of what that label connotes, a person who launched his campaign by disparaging immigrants from Mexico as rapists and criminals: a bully. We sat on our hand-me-down Ikea couch talking about the racism and hatred we saw in election news and online, talked about the civil rights protests that had erupted across the country, about black men and women in social media videos dying at the hands of police, about poverty and injustice and how we fit into it all considering whiteness and our general luck.

We aren’t rich. I never have been, and neither yet have you, but we are more well off than most in the world, and we’d always understood the privilege of that. We lived in Mississippi before moving to Pennsylvania. You were born there four years before I met you and your mother, six years before we all became a family. The light blue house we lived in there was on the white side of downtown. I was always shocked how the two sides were separated by a single, generally quiet street one could easily walk back and forth across, yet I heard no one talk about it, not even myself. Things aren’t really much different in Pennsylvania, which is also true for most of the country.

Part of the privilege of passing as white — which all whiteness is, passing — is silence. Or to borrow from Baldwin, whiteness “is not a color, it’s an attitude,” and part of that attitude is remaining quiet. For too long people of color have done most of the emotional and psychic labor of talking about the problem of race in America, have put themselves and their desires and pains out into the public for consideration and critique, exposed themselves out of, I am sure, nothing that felt like a choice. You and I understood this that evening, and we decided we could share our stories, who we were, queer and privileged and in debt, to be a vocal part of America against the violent rhetoric and actual violence we witnessed and knew. That we could and should be an active participant in the “balance of stories” novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says stands against the danger of having single stories about anyone or anything. To not replicate whiteness or heterosexuality or any other kind of enforced repression, but to offer something else.

We didn’t want to lecture, though, or explain anything. What did we know? Honestly, we hardly felt like speaking at all. So many people were already yelling, many from bodies that looked and sounded like ours, and this made us uncomfortable. We knew listening was also vitally important. But we could talk to one another, as we had been doing so, constantly, since you were a little girl. I’ve always cherished how close we are and have been. I remember telling your mother when you were around seven years old just how excited I was for you to continue developing your language and ideas and your life experience, so our conversations could deepen, so that we could talk even more about life and the various world. It did not take long. Soon you were retelling detailed stories from the immense books you were always reading, and teaching us about Japanese art and the complexities of gender. In 2016, I had started teaching Baldwin’s open letters to my students, and we thought we could try that, make our conversation public, like Baldwin did in the letters he published in magazines and newspapers, open letters to politicians and religious leaders, to Angela Davis and to his young namesake nephew, James. We would write about what we were always already talking about anyhow: your fears and my fears; your dreams and mine; my failures and yours; who we were, what we loved, and who we wanted to be; the world at large.

We didn’t write those letters — and I think that is okay. Back then, you were going to be an actress or a novelist. Today you argue passionately for prison abolition and are studying to be a public defender. You are becoming that voice we talked about so long ago, but in ways neither of us could have imagined. Even if you find a different path than the one you are already on, I am endlessly proud of you and who you are becoming, proud in ways words can never fully express. But me, I’ve been telling you that I am a writer for your entire life, and so my own silence is a kind of cowardice I can no longer bear. I want to finish what we started back in 2016, or begin it, and then keep going.

When you came out to us as a teenager as gay, I was happy for you, but I didn’t understand it as particularly or importantly courageous; I think this was because I knew you and loved you, and so I already much knew this part of you. I had no preconceived definition of who you were or who you should be, and so nothing changed as far as I could tell. It was just me, just us, your family, and we loved you. So many individual coming out stories are inspiring and heartbreaking in how courageous these people are and have to be, people standing up against religious condemnation, or confronting parents who reject who they love and who they are. My high school acting teacher lost much of his family and community when he came out. I’ve since come to understand more fully how courageous your action was then. I have come to see that declaring almost anything as true, particularly about the self, is an act of courage, and especially if that something is dismissed and despised by some others as unacceptable. You had more courage as a teenager than I have had my entire adult life as a writer.

I have long understood the monstrous history of race, as it was part of my public school education in Oregon since I was very young. I have always loved everyone (except at times myself) no matter what bodies they were born into. But I felt as I grew up quite free from any requirement to wrestle with that history. I did not feel history, racial history or otherwise, as a burden. Rather, quite the opposite, I felt a not inconsiderable freedom as a boy and young man, a narrative nurtured by that same education, alongside advertisements, cultural norms, movies. I have come to see that this felt freedom was never really any kind of freedom at all. It was instead a kind of mental prison separating me from humanity, and I think not unrelated to bouts of loneliness and self-loathing I would, and do, experience.

Once in college, a friend of mine who was black — a brilliant-beyond-her-years young woman who grew up in an intentional living community in the forest just outside the city of Roseburg — invited me to a Black Student Union meeting. The meeting was in a small room somewhere in the main building on the Southern Oregon University campus. There were maybe a dozen or more students in attendance, all black except for me. I had met none of them before, but then again I kept largely to myself in college. We sat in assorted chairs around a table. The students were considering an exhibition of lynching postcards, inarguably one of the most despicable examples of the American commodification of violence against black bodies, a horror so terrible it’s hard to comprehend, even in its unavoidable historical reality. The postcards were displayed on the table. I no longer remember if this was on a computer, in a book, or as individual postcards, but I do remember the lack of obvious violence in the photos on the postcards. The photographs on each postcard seem at a glance unremarkable, like some small town outdoor fair — that is until you focus in and recognize what the content actually is: a black body hanging from the branch of a tree. White people in the photos huddle in clusters around the hanging body, generally eating or looking around, some looking right at the camera. I remember feeling in the meeting that I was a spectator of other lives — by which I mean the other students in the room, people who, sadly and tragically, had to bear the terrible injustice of racism even today. This feeling wasn’t conscious in any kind of sense, but I know now this was how I understood things to be. At the same time, I am absolutely certain of how I wanted to talk with my friend and everyone in the meeting about those terrible postcards, share emotionally together how horrible it was, commune as community against an awful national and human history. But I was a coward, and my particular cowardice that afternoon was that I assumed the other people in the room did not want to hear from me or my feelings, that they no doubt considered me an “other,” rather than part of an “us,” and — as I often did then and do still — I translated my fear of not being loved or accepted into silence and distance. I did not attend a BSU meeting again, and it was years before I knew individual black people intimately. Such acts of cowardice I have in my heart rationalized as stoic individualism, but that I feel unlovable is perhaps a by-product of fear, rather than the other way around. In his letter to his nephew, Baldwin writes that people are “trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

I do see how anxious you are at times, and I know you worry about not being loved. If anything, that is perhaps the contemporary human condition, but I think it’s often wrong, and perhaps more narcissistic then we would want to admit. Still, over the years you have experienced love’s fragmentation, your family unit separating, the separate parts then reborn into new families, then those dissolving again. Of course I experience with you the destabilizing experience that is our always running flow of news and connection, human billions plugged in all at once to everything, algorithms and people, vying for just a moment of our dwindling attention. And you have gone places I never have, academically and culturally, putting yourself into competitive spaces where status anxiety and wealth must feel like a constant charge. I hope that you can keep with you, in your heart, what we wanted from these letters, to keep speaking what you see and know. As you move fuller into the world, in family and work and travel and love, I hope you remember what you bravely knew as a teenager, what you knew as a young girl in southern Mississippi, selling lemonade to help elect the nation’s first black president — that you continue knowing yourself, which means how you sit in the world and how it matters to you, you to it, and to trust love will meet your own. (And if you choose silence — which you should at times in this anxious, demanding world — perhaps do it with a plan, as Rich wrote, as the blueprint for a life.)

“You know what we do to people like you where I’m from?” I was 17 years old and had just filled the man’s truck with diesel fuel at the gas station where I worked, and, no, I did not know what they did to people like me. But also I did know. I could imagine, and I knew the history of human violence. (Two years later, college student Matthew Shepard would be tied to a fence in Colorado and murdered for being gay.) It wasn’t really a question anyhow, and he climbed back into his truck and drove away. Did he mean my earrings, perhaps? My sarcasm, or my sagging pants? I assume he meant people like me as queer or punk, people who don’t look or act how he or others want people to look or act. Deviants. Witches. Weirdos. But he didn’t mean white. I find how Baldwin describes whiteness as attitude as incredibly freeing, as my skin no longer feels like a trap, like I have to be the thing I so actively despise, by which I mean something invented to hold power over other people’s bodies in order to terrorize and violate and steal. (Being black, Baldwin though feels, is a historical condition, but one a person can have pride in, hard-fucking-won at that.) As you know, I have never been good with most normative attitudes. I did enough drugs as a teenager and in my 20s to free the minds of a small city. I have had sex with men and loved men. I wore women’s clothes and underwear as a young boy, most often in secret, but also loudly and publicly, wearing a tight black dress to high school prom. They almost didn’t let us in, and the next year the high school made a rule against such cross-dressing. (And the list goes on, but I’m still a little scared, it seems.)

Joan Didion once wrote that a part of writing is shutting off the learned voice in your head telling you that you’re the least important person in the room. Children, I have discovered over sixteen years as parent to you and your sister, make one unavoidably important — and so one must then take on all the responsibility and labor such importance demands. I haven’t felt important for years, if ever, except for, somehow magically and easily and always, when it comes to you and your sister. It is a form of grace, and I am writing this letter in the privilege and space that you and such grace allow. Your grace — in that you love and listen to me — I hope continues to teach me about a wider kind of grace that I am an intimate part of, how my responsibilities and loves are, like Baldwin’s, akin with all of humanity.

Baldwin’s open letter to his nephew was published 60 years ago in The Progressive magazine. As a writer, Baldwin was just figuring out the power of his nonfiction, and within a year he would be a leading literary voice of the civil rights movement. He titled the letter “My Dungeon Shook,” a reference to a church spiritual, and used by Baldwin to evoke epiphany, quoting at the letter’s conclusion: “The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.” What Baldwin is trying to explain in the letter to his nephew — and, as it’s an open letter, to all readers — is that everyone in the country is imprisoned by racial violence and hate, white people perhaps most unexpectedly so, because for them the prison (dungeon) is invisible: for them the prison looks like freedom. The only way out for any of us, Baldwin writes, is love. You must love them, he tells his nephew, as it is the only way forward, and the way to keep your mind and heart from being imprisoned by the ignorance of others. You must love, Baldwin unbelievably and powerfully argues to his young nephew, those who hate and wish you dead: “You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope.”

As a queer young woman, you align more with Baldwin’s black nephew than I originally realized writing this letter; a friend — a woman — recently pointed this out to me. Some of your fellow citizens want control over your body. Some of your fellow citizens want to legislate who you can love, kiss, who can hold you as you die. They want to say what a family is. We are family, you and I, though there is no law for it. And I don’t know what it will be like when I am sick or dying, who or what I might have to fight or persuade that you are my daughter. (There is not a good language for chosen families, and our narratives of stepparenting are lacking, like so many of the ways families exist and move and grow.) You will always be my daughter. I won’t be silent about any of it, because love is an action. In another open letter Baldwin published, this time to Angela Davis while she was in jail in 1970, he wrote, “Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can.”

Your sister wrote me a letter the other day that was so beautiful I could barely read it. A few days before she wrote the letter, as we were getting ready for bed, she said to me that your mother told her, “Dad only writes as a hobby.” I see how your mother got there, as I haven’t published a book, but it still broke my heart a little. It’s something I had thought about a lot myself, who I was as a writer and what it meant, but I had figured some things out and found peace. I explained how I felt about it to your sister. Here is part of what she wrote in response: “You talked to me about how it feels silly to call yourself a writer. You then told me how you (mainly) overcame that, especially for me. That I, and E., am your book, the best one you ever made. I feel proud to be that. You see I love these deep, or just opening up conversations with you. (If you didn’t know already.) To be so open with you, it fills and warms my heart.” Talk about grace.

I can’t remember if I told you about the time I met Adrienne Rich on a winter afternoon in early 2004, on a New York City sidewalk outside The New School auditorium. I had been inside the auditorium earlier for a book awards ceremony, where Rich had won for her latest book of poems. She was just 74 years old, but, because her arthritis was so crippling, in order to get on to the stage to accept the award she had to walk up the stairs backward. Rich’s poetry and life were filled with the injustices she had witnessed and knew, and she wove her love and the human world together into her books and her life as a writer. Outside the school, as I was about to walk back to a friend’s apartment where I was staying, I noticed Rich on the sidewalk across the street. She looked small and powerful. I hesitated. Then I walked across the street, and I asked her if she would sign my copy of her 1978 book The Dream of a Common Language — a book described by Rich’s biographer as her “literary coming-out as a lesbian.” The book was a gift for your mother, who I was learning how to love. “Here,” Rich said to a younger woman accompanying her, carefully extending her things, “please hold this, so I can sign this nice young man’s book.”

Six years ago, you and I set out to write open letters to one another. It’s never too late. Your turn. No rush.

Love,

Dad