“If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic-bean-buyer… If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire For we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in!”

Shel Silverstein, Invitation

Yep. This picture sums up a big chunk of my life. Just a whole lot of white space and me—bottom left corner to the center of it all. Trying to fit in and not realizing that I never will. Not realizing that not fitting in is a gift. 

I am Marcie Alvis Walker, daughter of Jim Crow, granddaughter of the first Great Migration, great granddaughter of the cotton gin. My people were reaped from cotton, sugar and tobacco fields, steeped in Red Summers, burnished in coal mines from the deep dirty south to West Virginia to Cleveland, Ohio. I got sisters, brothers, cousins and play-cousins who look like George Floyd. I got a kid who used to play in the park like Tamir Rice, who wore hoodies and loved Skittles like Trayvon Martin. I’ve loved men like Philando Castile and Oscar Grant. 

I’ve been raised by relentless women who were just minding their own business until their business was the world’s. Women like Harriet Tubman, Mamie Till, and Fannie Lou Hamer. I’m a mom like Michael Brown’s mother who asked the world, “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to graduate?” My mother gave me and my siblings away because she knew exactly how hard it was. I grew up with girls who had dreams just like Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. And I have dreams just like they did. 

So I write and I write and I write, hoping that whoever reads me will see that I’m the same as them and this history is not the past and not old. I don’t know how many words it will take for you to feel me. I don’t know how many essays or how many posts. I’ve written hundreds of each. Most days I still feel unfelt, misunderstood, and lonely. I write more words. I figure I haven’t lost hope as long as I keep writing. 

Sandra, Breonna, George, Tamir, Trayvon, Philando, Oscar, Harriet, Mamie, Fannie Lou, Michael Brown’s mother, my mother, my grandmothers, my grandfathers, my aunties, my uncles, my sisters and brothers, my cousins and play cousins, my nieces and nephews, my kid, and my ancestors tilling the soil, mopping the floors, mining the coal are my ideal readers. I hope they know I feel them.