Jasmine L. Holmes - Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy on Identity and Hope

Jackie Hill Perry

Black boys have it hard in this country. I know not because Ive experienced it myself but because Im married to one who has. My husband, a black boy once, now a man with the same skin, has opened my eyes to that reality. Being with him is how Ive seen that the burdens brown boys speak about carrying are not exaggerations. One time, we were going through TSA before boarding a flight for home. My husbands boarding pass was given a red stamp unlike mine. At security, my experience was ordinary. I went through the x-ray once. My husband went through as well, but upon handing his stamped boarding pass to the agent, he was told that he needed to be checked again. I asked one of the agents about the stamp and the additional security screening. He was stamped because he looked suspicious, the agent said.

I wondered what made him more suspicious than I would be. Or anyone else for that matter. Was it that he didnt smile wide enough at the flight agent? Maybe it was because he made too much eye contact with her or maybe not enough? She mightve thought him to be impersonal or maybe too personal for her liking. All of these were vain speculations thougha charitable practice in denial. We both knew that his skin alongside all that he was made him a potential threat to the safety of an entire airport. But even then, I knew it wasnt just the deep brown tint of his body, a tone that God providentially intended for him to have. It was that he was brown and boy. It is one thing to be an African American in this country; it is another to be that and male. There is something about the two being embodied in one that sets Americans on fire.

Jasmines letters to her son, I think, are her way of turning her pen into a hydrant. Not only to put out the flames inside of individuals and communities. The heat coming from the unwillingness and perhaps inability to acknowledge that race and racism is a reality in our country. But her letters, a metaphor for water, are here to quench our thirst. To give us something that we all need: life. This life not springing out of nowhere but out of Someone. Jesus, that beautiful brown man that dignifies us all. Her words are anchored in a truth that isnt biased but rather a truth that sets people freebut they still must choose to pick up the glass and drink.

These letters are personal and yet applicable to us all. With child or without. Brown or white. Married or single. We may not all understand what it is to be her, a black mother with a brown boy, but we all understand what it is like to love. To care so deeply for someone that your affection becomes words, and these words a means to encourage, teach, remind, warn, and inspire. But I personally believe that Jasmines words arent just an expression of her love for Wynn, but the evidence of her love for you, the reader. If that werent the case, she couldve easily written each chapter by hand, bound them with string, and set them somewhere safe for Wynn to read when he is able. But instead, here they are, typed on a page, bound in a book, and in your hands to read right now. Her words to Wynn are just as much for you as they are for him. Thats love.

It was my friend Karen Ellis who first told me to use my Wynnspiration.

Wynn is my son. As I write this, hes just turned two years old. No one could ever be more loved by his parents than my husband, Phillip, and I adore our little boy. He is extroverted, inquisitive, fiercely affectionate, and staunchly opinionated. Hes discovering so much about this world and has yet to grow jaded by the ups and downs of finding his place therein.

I am five foot eight. My husband is six foot six. So we are expecting a little giant. And we know that from a very early age, he is likely to be the biggest kid, the strongest kid, and the one least likely to be seen by outsiders as a kid. We know that he may be perceived as more threatening and aggressive than his non-black peers. We know that, like his daddy and me, he might grow up with stories of having been made to feel other because of the color of his skin.

We want him to walk through life cognizant of these facts without becoming jaded by them. We want to teach him that he has incomparable value in the eyes of the Father in spite of the way he will often be perceived. Though this life will sometimes make him feel less than human, he is more than a conqueror through his Savior. Against all odds, we want to raise an optimist. Someone who knows that he might receive the worst that this world has to offer and still believes the best. Someone who cultivates glorious respites from the cruelty of the world by the grace of God.

We also want to raise someone who will change this world so that by and by the narrative that he has to tell his sonor maybe that his son will have to tell his son, or his sons sonwill be different. We want to hold that tension of the already with the not yet. The already being that Walter Wynn Holmes is an image bearer, invested with identity, dignity, and significance, and that in Gods economy his brown skin is nothing more than a glorious display of the creative purpose of the Father. And the not yet being the fact that sometimes the world does not see this identity, dignity, and significance, and that the results are often grievous.