Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with a sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained. -Helen Keller

“I hate I had you!” 

Those were my mother’s words, the woman who gave me life, right after my stepfather walked out on her seeking whatever he thought the underworld had to offer. As much as I love my mother, I know with everything I am that she meant every last syllable she uttered. Perhaps she had a right to feel as she did. I mean, it’s not like I had enough sense to comfort her at a time when life had her twisted in a figure four. Today, I’m certain her words had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fight she had on her hands. It was a fight that determined the success or failure of her children born out of wedlock and in the absence of willing hearts and helpful hands that would carry her through the struggle of motherhood. 

_____

I have been in prison since I was twenty-one. April 24, 2021, marks twenty-four years of 

incarceration for me. After a bit of calculating, it recently hit home that out of my forty-six years of life, almost thirty of them have been spent in some form of institution. Like my mother, I didn’t know what to do with my mind, body, or soul, and found it difficult to understand what most people assume is simple. I make no excuses for bad decisions, but I’d be lying if I told you I knew what a good decision looked like prior to attending college in prison, of all places. 

Contrary to conventional beliefs, the genesis of all learning rests at the breast of one’s mother. She carries the responsibilities of feeding, clothing, and sheltering the child’s body, if not the mind and soul. And she does most of these things by her lonesome. See, people of African descent have never stopped living in perilous times, despised for things over which we have no control. That’s crazy. But even crazier than that are the women, every single mother striving to impart into her children the best she has to offer the world. Whether or not she comes up short is overlooked by the masses. That is, until one of her children is found in the backseat of a police cruiser. To top things off, this same child blames his or her mother for years to come because someone failed him. Not once does it cross his mind that the whole of society has helped fashion him into a crook. 

Even if mom was to blame for this capital life sentence I’m serving, I get it now. I understand her plight better than most, as God has increased my own capacity to demand more from my mind…But when you hear her expression of hurt in the form of “I hate I had you!” what she’s really saying to her children is 

“I hate I had you…baby, because I really and truly love you more than I love myself, and I don’t have the slightest clue how to make you into a king, a queen, a prince, or a princess, ‘cuz I want better for you than the injustice of loneliness in a society that don’t care about us.”