“He will try to convince you to let him stay here, but there is nobody here to be with him, so I want him to stay with you.”
This was the message I sent my teenager’s dad - along with info about meds, school schedules, driver’s ed and such - before heading out on book tour. Years of work had led to this moment that was just days away: the launch of my latest book, Be A Revolution.
“Are you so excited about book tour?” Just about everyone had been asking me in the day’s leading up.
“I’m not really capable of getting excited about big important things before they happen,” I would try to explain. I’m much more of a “stress over everything that could go wrong and try your hardest to account for every possibility and only take a deep breath and enjoy the last few minutes of a thing when it’s clear that disaster hasn’t struck” type of person. When I explain this, people look sad. I get it.
Marcus, my sixteen year old, really doesn’t like to not stay at our house when I leave town. He loves his dad and they get along really well. But he hates a change to his schedule, all his instruments are here, and our house is half a block from school. When he goes to his dad’s he’s transporting giant musical instruments everywhere, he’s not allowed to play music at all hours because he has siblings who didn’t grow up in a musical household where the constant sound of instruments is very normal, and he has to wake up a good half hour earlier every day to get to school on time - and he’s already taking an extra early morning music class.
When it’s just me traveling, my partner Gabriel stays home and little changes. When we both travel, my older son Malcolm and his girlfriend would often come stay so that (with the added assist of my mom who lives in a little house behind ours) the teen could stay at the house. But Gabriel was going on tour with me and Malcolm was on an anniversary trip with his girlfriend (and last time that the older kid was in charge while I was away recording the audiobook I got a call from the assistant principle that my teen had set off a bunch of stink bombs in the hallway. When I called my older son to find out what the hell happened he sighed and said, “oh yeah, he said he was gonna do that.” So he’s not going to be in charge for a little while). And then, days before we left, my sister (who works as my assistant)’a partner broke their ankle and my grandma’s house burned down, so my mom announced that she was leaving the next day to Kansas to go help her mother and then would be leaving to Baltimore to help my sister with her partner and their kids. The teen would definitely be going to his dad’s.
Now, I know that this was worse for my grandma (who was, btw, unhurt and generally doing pretty well, thankfully) but as someone who is always on the lookout for what can go wrong before a big event - this didn’t bode well for tour.
I wrote in my last post about my first few days on tour and they actually went reallly well. You can read more about it here. But I want to add a little note about the amazing work that my publicist Yona Deshommes did on these events.
Publishing is overwhelmingly white and one of the many ways in which it can have a very visible and harmful impact on BIPOC writers is in publicity. When So You Want To Talk About Race came out back in 2018, it was over a month before I got to talk to a single Black person about the book. I’ll always remember a radio day that my publicist booked for me right after the book launched. I spent all day in a local NPR station alone, doing interview after interview with white hosts, for white-centered radio shows, being asked in multiple ways if racism was really as big a deal as we Black people made it out to be.
This was on Martin Luther King day, by the way.
A few weeks later I was on a panel about being Black in publishing and I talked about this experience as an example of some of the difficulties that Black writers face in the publishing process.
The next day, after the discussion aired, I got a call from my publicist and she was crying. She didn’t know what she could have done differently, she said talking to me as she walked on crowded NYC sidewalks. She had done her best. She just didn’t really know any Black people in media. Did I know any Black people in media? Maybe she could ask some of her friends…
For Be A Revolution my lovely editor proactively hired Yona, a Black publicist, to team up with the in-house publicity team for U.S. events and interviews for the book release. And on this book tour as I stood in Black spaces, facing a Black audience, talking with Black moderators, and surrounded in Black love, I really felt the difference.
At my event in Washington DC, as we eagerly awaited Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s arrival in the greenroom, a group of sorors from Yona’s sorority showed up, all decked in blue. One woman, perhaps 10-15 years my senior, went around the room demanding to see everyone’s phone. If we blinked in confusion she would just repeat the demand more slowly, as if the confusion was with our hearing. “Let me see your phone.” There was no arguing with her. She was somebody’s mom. If not, she was now our mom. That’s what it means to be a Black elder. We would hand over our phones, one by one, in a daze. She would then grab a small silver sticker and place it on the back of our phones. “you are beautiful” it said.
“I’ve given out over 50,000 of these,” she said proudly. None of us doubted her.
Rashida Tlaib showed up and we were all so excited to meet her and honored that she had agreed to speak with me on stage.
The energy in the room increased as we took pictures and prepared to go out onstage. People fluttered around Rashida Tlaib. The Black elder calmly cut through the crowd and went right up to Tlaib. “Let me see your phone.” She said.
Writing can be such a solitary endeavor, and I think that a desire for solitude (or at least a very high tolerance of it) has to be built into a writer if they are going to build a life in this work. And the whiplash between the months or even years of quiet solitude of writing, verses the overnight shift to the very public and fast-paced life of book tour is pretty difficult to adjust to. But having Gabriel with me reallly made a difference. Not only did he run all sorts of interference for me all day, he was that stability and familiarity that I needed. He was a soft place to land at the end of a hard day.
Halfway through tour we had an evening free. We had flown into Detroit and my event wasn’t until the next day. We showed up at a hotel that was surely the height of elegance in 1992.
“You have a free upgrade to our deluxe suite!” the front desk clerk announced, “Just sign this acknowledgement of our rules against parties and loud music.”
We entered a hotel suite on the top flour that was, I shit you not, as big as my house. 12 year old me would have entered this room and would have thought I was a gazillionaire. Animal prints and fake marble abounded. It just needed a few Nagel prints and it would have been perfect. We had a nice night, Gabriel and I. We watched a movie and were feeling quite romantic until I realized that I had left my purse (with wallet and passport) in the bar downstairs. After some frantic searching in which nobody at the bar had recalled seeing said purse, we were able to find it fully intact with hotel security.
We went back upstairs and the evening commenced, until I received a personal message from someone that completely took the wind out of me. I can’t really talk about it further, but it just took away whatever little reserve of calm I had left and put me in a place of absolute panic. I spent the night trying, and failing, to remember all that my therapist and I had worked on these last few years to help when my anxiety had been spiralling. But honestly, things had been going so well in recent moonths that I was out of practice. I texted my therapist asking if they would have time to talk the next day. Eventually the effort of trying to calm down exhausted me and I fell asleep.
The next morning my mom called, having returned home the day before, to say that she stopped by our house and my teenager was there on the couch, sleeping through class.
I took a deep breath and texted my son’s dad. “Why was Marcus sleeping at my house?” I asked. “He said you said it was okay.” He replied.
After reasserting that I did not want the teenager to stay at the house his dad agreed to pick him up in the morning. My mom checked in on him and my older son (who had just returned from his trip but couldn’t stay at our house) came by for a while to make sure things were okay.
“There’s six teenagers at your house right now and I think they’re cooking burgers. I’ll make sure the house doesn’t burn down,” my older son reported.
Cool.
The evening in Detroit was cold and Gabriel turned the heat on in our luxury 1990’s penthouse hotel room. Copious amounts of weed smoke started pumping through the vents. It was seriously like someone was smoking right next to me. I was worried that the hotel people were going to think it was me. I had signed their “no party” rules.
Just as I was staring at the vent trying to figure out exactly how much weed could possibly be being smoked in a room nearby to produce that much smoke, my therapist called.
I quickly downloaded through tears the past 24 hours’ events and my need for help getting back to a more grounded place. My therapist reminded me of some of the techniques we had been working on, helped me reconnect with the reality of the situation and my core emotions instead of just the place that my anxiety was in. They asked me to describe the room I was in to bring me back to the here and now.
“I’m in a giant hotel suite that was very fancy in 1992 and there are copious amounts of weed smoke pumping in through the vents right now,” I answered.
My therapist paused for barely a second. “Well….does weed relax you or make you more anxious?” they asked.
“We’ll find out!” I answered. We both laughed.
After the call I was able to sleep. I don’t know if it was the weed smoke or the laughter.
The next morning my teen was picked up and returned to his dad’s. A few hours later, I got an alert on our security camera that the teen was back at the house. As soon as his dad had left to run errands he had gotten a ride right back.
His dad came home to discover his teen gone and informed me that he was headed back to our house to get him again. A few minutes later I got a call from his dad from my house asking me to clear up some confusion.
“Mom you totally said that I could stay here.” I could hear the teen argue in the background.
“I did not and you know it.” I replied.
After realizing that this tactic wasn’t going to work, he sighed and said, “Mom, can you understand my frustration here? I made a lot of plans for these next few days and this really messes them up.”
Ask me why I ended up feeling bad for ruining this kid’s teen home-alone plans with my book tour? Actually don’t ask me, ask my therapist.
Our last book event on the road was in Toronto and it was a truly wonderful night. It was a full house of people and the energy was so great. Just the type of engaged audience that makes you feel like every point you are making is the point, and every joke is the funniest joke. My conversation partner was lovely and brilliant. There was a book signing after and hundreds of people waited in line for hours in like, the best humor possible.
I’ve been signing these books with “Because you can!” along with my signature, because I have the most pathetic autograph ever - because I never imagined when I decided how I would sign my name as a young adult that I’d ever be signing anything other than like, w-2’s and shit, and now it’s too late to change it. It’s just a cursive “I” and a squiggle and a dot that implies that another letter in that squiggle is either an I or a J. I feel bad knowing that people wait in line and that is all I have to give. A squiggle. So for every book I’ve added a little phrase to make up for it.
I signed one woman’s book and she shouted “no way! I have a tattoo on my foot that says, ‘Because I can’ want to see?”
“I believe you!” I quickly answered before she could get her shoe off. She was amazing.
There were a few people who didn’t have books to sign, “I just wanted to see your makeup up close,” they explained. This happened at least once at every book signing. At one stop, a woman informed me that she thinks my makeup looks that I post online are the most important activism work I do.
I don’t know y’all, I’m still processing that one.
The day after the Toronto event (my last day on the road) was spent doing press interviews. All went well until the last stop. I was sitting, trying to look as professional and camera-ready as possible in front of tv cameras. Prepared to talk about the book and the amazing people in it. I believe the second question the interviewer asked me was:
“Why do you identify as Black when your mother is white?”
And it went downhill from there.
Before y’all ask, “was he…?”
Yes, yes he was.
I was so thrown for a loop. I was sitting there on set, on camera, suddenly in a very hostile space trying to answer intrusive and combative questions. I don’t think one question was asked about the beautiful individuals profiled in my book.
Gabriel and I had made plans that evening to see Toronto friends that we hadn’t seen since our wedding. But I was so exhausted from the interview that I just went back to the hotel room and took a long nap. It felt like all of the joy I had from the evening before, when I was surrounded by loving community, had been stolen from me.
Eventually I got out of bed and Gabriel and I tried to salvage the evening with a nice dinner. As we were talking in the restaurant about the day’s events Gabriel asked me about how I was able to handle the interviews the way that I did.
“He was asking all these horrible questions and you were just so calmly answering them. Your answers were great, they were right on. You didn’t give him an inch. But you didn’t seem angry, even though I knew you were. You had a smile on your face. How did you do it?”
I tried to answer. I talked a little bit about my years of being a speaker and trainer, my years of working in white spaces. But the truth is that so much of why I did what I did in that interview is a blur to me because I was in survival mode. The hostility of the space put me into a space so many of us know, where we are very aware that we aren’t safe and our defense programming kicks in. I know how to answer these awful questions. I’ve been asked them a million times before. I don’t even have to really think about my answer. Which is a good thing, because at the time my head was screaming. But I couldn’t scream. A Black woman can’t scream at a white man. A Black woman can’t be visibly angry. None of these were like, thoughts I could fully articulate at the time. This was all automatic programming of what can keep me safe and what would put me more at risk in a situation that my body recognizes as unsafe. Answer the question as accurately as possible. Don’t give an inch intellectually. You know how to counter this. Smile. Shake hands. It was a pleasure.
Fuck. I wish I had yelled. I wish I had gotten up and left. I wish I could have found a way around the lifetime of programming that tells me that there are times where it’s not safe to be a whole Black woman in a space so I must lock the screaming, seething part of me away for a while.
But I didn’t. I finished the interview. Signed his book. “Because you can!”
He cannot. He doesn’t want to.
That was it. That was the end of tour.
The next morning we were at the airport to fly home. Everyone was watching the bestseller lists. Would this be enough to make the ever-important lists? I didn’t even know that these lists were things I had to care about when I started writing. I didn’t know until I got a call the week after So You Want To Talk About Race launched with condolences that I hadn’t made the list. Until then, I was just happy that I had published a book. I cried realizing I had failed at something I hadn’t known I needed to achieve.
As we settled in at the airport my agent texted me with congratulations that I had made two of the three lists - the Indie Bestseller List and the USA Today list. We were still waiting on the NYT list. I knew by now, my third book in, that this was something that mattered. That I could write a book that meant the world to me, and it could be released and community could come out to support and somehow I could still fail this really important thing.
Gawd, I was so tired. I looked at this good news on these two lists and just started crying at the airport cafeteria table. My partner looked at me concerned and confused.
“I just want to go home.” I said.
Mid-flight I was informed that I didn’t make the NYT list. “None of my books have made it the first week,” I replied, “It would be strange to start now.”
I processed that now-familiar bit of bad news for a few minutes and then I was okay. I was going to be home soon.
I came home last night to a teenager who was damn near ecstatic to see me. I got updates on everything, friends, his current political obsessions, new music theory he was working with. He has this excited dancing stim he does when he’s happy and comfortable and he was dancing all over the place as he thought of new things to tell me. Eventually I gave him a hug goodnight and a big kiss on the cheek. Then I crawled into my very comfortable bed next to my partner who was sound asleep. I’ll unpack later. Everything was okay. So this was actually how I am ending book tour.
Tonight and tomorrow are my big hometown book events. I’ll get to talk about my book with my community that I love so much. My family will be there. My teen will probably make faces at me every time that I look his direction. I will put on a kf-94 mask and I will hug people I love. I don’t even have to be stressed about what might go wrong. Dammit I’m excited. It will be a success.
I loved every bit of this, even the parts that totally pissed me off like the fact that you and all black women have to endure the white assholes who run the show. Your grace under fire amazes me. And the interwoven stories of your teen created a beautiful thread connecting the whole story, certainly for any of us who have raised teenagers. All the frustration rolled into one big ball of caring, and love. You are quite a miracle. I am still pondering what the woman said about the activism of your make up moments, and it makes me smile.
One of the most powerful stories in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is when Maya has a tooth ache and her Gand Momma takes her to their local white dentist and this racist slime bucket refuses to see Maya- and Maya envisions how her Gandma thrashed this skinny little cowardly white man- and in the retelling/envisioning how her Grandma had all the power/anger/authority/agency so to did young Maya. It was a hilarious Bugs Bunny type ass whopping that her Grandma laid down on that little salamander newt white coward. I too and envisioning you whopping this racist white slime bucket’s ass back in Toronto and knee slapping laughing at the fall of that puny little man.