To my white son born in Mississippi,
You are a wonder. No one else in the world has ever been made just like you. And no one ever will be again. You are a child of God. You deserve opportunity. You deserve freedom.
I want you to know how deeply I believe in your goodness before I say everything that comes next.
You, my son, were born under a lucky star, and freedom and opportunity are already written into your individual story. There’s another story you need to know, and I feel that I will not be doing my job as your mama if I don’t share it with you.
You were born white and male. These facts, among many others determined before you were born, give you power and privilege.
White supremacy, white privilege, systemic racism. They’re not terms you’re going to find in your alphabet book, and you’re not ready to hear them yet. You don’t even recognize the names of colors. I wrote many letters to you before you were born, and today I have words for you long before you will ever hear them.
Two weeks ago when we were at the beach, a crowd of people ankle deep in the water pointed to something just feet in front of them at the shoreline. They motioned for family members to bring their cameras over. Kids squealed in delight, retreated in fear, and looked on with curiosity. I eventually got out of my beach chair and walked over to have a look for myself.
A shark. It was a shark. Not a very big one, but it didn’t take a big one to get everyone out of the water. It patrolled back and forth, swimming parallel to the shore. This was two days after horrific news of white supremacists and neo-Nazis violently marching and rioting in Charlottesville, holding torches, wearing swastikas, and chanting “White lives matter”. This line from a poem by Guante kept coming to mind:
“Remember: White supremacy is not a shark; it is the water.”
That week we saw the sharks in Charlottesville, but we have never left the water.
This letter is just a small look into the story of how we have swum and continue to swim in the waters of white supremacy.
Before there was you
Your father and I fell in love on a college campus with a Confederate major as its mascot. We called ourselves the Majors, and “Major Pride” was a cutesy pun we used for school pride without thinking twice about the image and history it evoked. I told your daddy I loved him for the first time in a garden on-campus that houses the tomb of Major Reuben Millsaps. Because I am white, I never had to contend with the fact that my college was named after a man who fought in a war to keep my ancestors uneducated and enslaved. I didn’t have to see daily references to, constant reminders of a time in history when my people were property, their bodies not their own and their humanity disregarded.
Your dad ran around the city neighborhoods after dark. He always felt safe, and no one ever reported him to the police. He was a white beacon running through the streets. He was a shiny reflector, reflecting the same color back to the residents, so it didn’t concern them that he was there. They didn’t wonder if he was fleeing the scene of a crime or if he was about to hurt someone.
Our first house after we got married was in a small town in Mississippi. Daddy spent some months as a substitute teacher at a predominantly white private school, and the white teenagers came by our house several times around Halloween to “roll it” with toilet paper. We were told it meant they liked us. Each time they got more aggressive. One time they smashed our jack-o-lantern and beer bottles on the driveway, and another time they scattered all our trash on our lawn. We called the police, and even though we knew who some of the kids were, we basically were told: “This is what these kids do”. If a group of black teenagers from the public high school had been driving around town and jumping out of a pick-up truck onto someone’s property in the middle of the night, what would have happened? Would they have walked away? Would they have lived?
After you joined us
When we drove you home from the hospital, we drove past a small, tattered Confederate flag raised over the garage of a house down the street. Then on your very first evening stroll and every one since then, the Confederate flag shone through the window of a neighbor’s house. There it was, hanging on the wall with white Christmas lights gleaming over it. I only see white males coming and going from that house, taking out the garbage and climbing into their trucks. They smile and wave to me when I walk by. To you the flag in their home will be just an ugly symbol, not one that means that the men who live there might hate you and do you harm.
When we named you, we chose a name we had never heard used before as a first name. I never worried that you wouldn’t get a job because of the unique family name we chose for you, a name that had meaning to us.
When you were two weeks old, I was awake one night rocking and nursing you. That week two black men in our country had been fatally shot by law enforcement officers within days of each other. A year later, I don’t even remember their names because there have been so many lives taken. I have to Google it. Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. Say their names.
Baby boy, I sat in that chair looking at your face in wonder and awe, imagining what your interests would be and what you would choose to do with your life. But I knew that had you been born with brown skin, I wouldn’t have been able to simply enjoy you in this moment of utter innocence. I would have already been scared for your life and what was to come. I would not have just wept for Alton and Philando’s families and our country; I would have wept for you. Because I would know it was my job to send you out into a world where they tell you that your life matters but their actions show violence and injustice, putting you and those you love in mortal danger.
As you grow
When you’re a teenager and want to make money in the summer, you can walk down the street with your lawnmower and people may actually answer the door. They will not report you on the private neighborhood website with a description of your appearance. They will not take a moment to assess if that lawnmower was just stolen from a carport.
When a break-in happens in our neighborhood, an elderly white man won’t speculate at the potluck that it was you and your friends, the boys he’d seen outside playing basketball in their own driveway. He won’t think that since you’re on vacation from school, you got bored and, being unsupervised, decided to rob and vandalize the homes of your neighbors.
When you leave the house wearing a hoodie, I won’t have to worry that it could be the tipping point to get you killed.
Son, you didn’t choose your skin color any more than anyone else did. I don’t want you to feel guilty for the color of your skin. There is nothing wrong with the color of your skin. The color of your skin, though, means something to this world. It gives you opportunities and freedom that others don’t have, and it has served white people for centuries. It will serve you in ways you will never detect or fathom.
Know your background
You are a European-American, with touches of Asian and even North African heritage on my side. That “exotic” representation in your genes come from white colonization, from the French colonization of Cambodia and Algeria. It came from a white person of power, maybe one in uniform and with a gun, entering the body of a woman of lesser power. Violently? We don’t know. Consensually? We don’t know. Whatever consent there was was between a man whose country took on hers as part of their empire. Did she become part of his empire, too?
Every one of our ancestors in America chose to come to this country. They came for better opportunities; they came for love; they came for new life. I can find some of their names written in the rolls of Ellis Island. They didn’t all live under good conditions or have wealth. They wouldn’t all be thought of as being privileged, and many struggled. One died in a Kentucky mine, leaving a family of six kids without a father or livelihood. They ate minestra soup, a traditional Italian meal of the poor, almost daily. Your great grandma said it was heavy on the broth, light on the beans.
They had bodily autonomy, though. That means that no one owned their bodies as property, free to do whatever they wanted with it. No one could sell them. No one had the power to violently assault them. They could move to a new home or city if they wanted. It was not illegal for them to read and get an education. They didn’t have to worry their children would be sold down river. Life may have been hard, but their children were their children, and their bodies were their bodies. It may have been hard, but they had decision-making power in their lives.
Son, you didn’t inherit generations of lack of agency and stolen humanity in your collective consciousness. You didn’t inherit a life where people who look like you are five times more likely to go to prison than your white neighbors. You inherited a life where people will assume you are a good boy. You inherited a life where if you make a mistake, society will see it as a mistake that you deserve to move past on your way to your bright future.
You come from families that are powerfully situated in Mississippi’s history.
As a girl with no ties to Mississippi before moving here as an adolescent, I never thought a future son of mine would be connected to these narratives of the South, but here you are.
Your great grandfather Judge Ben Guider named the Ole Miss “Rebels” in 1936 when his submission won the most votes for proposed names for the sports teams of the University of Mississippi. I’ve never heard the story of how he picked that name, but it’s understood to be a nod of pride to the secessionist “rebels” of the South who fought in the Civil War, particularly the students who enlisted, who became known as the “University Greys” and who comprised almost the entire student body. Add that to “Ole Miss”, the name used to refer to the wife of a plantation owner, and Colonel Reb, the mascot many still rally around in their heart, and you have a trifecta of white Southern pride.
Your blood flows in symbols of oppression. It’s an oppression so ingrained, so basic to our culture that we often can’t see it. It’s the foundation on which our houses are built. We have strategic landscaping to hide it and retaining walls and drainage systems to protect it. We build our houses with carefully decorated rooms on this foundation that rests on the backs of those who built our country with their blood, sweat, and tears.
The oppression is so ingrained that we don’t even see how we’re hurting others when we wave flags that champion our history of supremacy. We don’t see or we just don’t care. And the worst of us actively hope to do harm. Whatever fear, pride, or nostalgia leads us to cling to these Confederate emblems, for black people they must be constant visual reminders that:
We owned your people. You were not free. You belonged to us.
If a person sees that symbol of oppression and aggression against them every day, how much opportunity do they have to be truly free?
Today, as I write this, Mississippi is still resisting changing our state flag, with its Confederate stars and bars in the corner.
Son, I want you to understand that white supremacy and systemic racism have been on your side forecasting some of your story since well before you were born. No matter what is in your heart and what you believe, it is there holding you up. You can’t get rid of it. You can’t deny it. You can’t give it away to someone else if you don’t want it. But you can use your voice to help fight it. You can use your actions to combat inequity.
White supremacy is not your fault, but it is your responsibility to face it, to search your own heart, to know our history and to interpret what is happening in the world you find yourself in. It is your responsibility to live higher when you know better.
To be white and male–especially in Mississippi–you have a job.
Some day you will go to work and make money, but you will have another job that is never off-hours. It’s a really important job, and it begins way before you’re on a payroll.
Right now you are learning your first words, and we celebrate them, knowing that in the future, you will have a responsibility to do a whole lot of listening. I don’t want you to think your voice isn’t important and that your ideas shouldn’t be heard. You need to know, though, that your voice will be given power that others’ will not–just because of the color of your skin and the genitals under your clothing. The level of education of your parents and the education you receive will put you in an even higher tier.
You have structural power that was imprinted on you like your DNA. This means that if a person of color or a woman is trying to speak, your job is NOT to speak louder or faster and is definitely not to interrupt or to talk over them. Your job will be to listen. Your job will be to sit down. Your job will be to let their words stand and to not redecorate them as your own.
If a woman or person of color tells you about a time they were hurt or scared or mistreated, your job is to believe them. Your job is to step outside of your own experience and try to begin to imagine theirs. Dispel doubt, dispel disbelief, dispel internal intellectual critique. Believe is what you do. We should not require anyone to make themselves vulnerable with us in order to prove or explain their vulnerable status.
Sometimes your job will be to listen. Other times, I hope you will feel called to stand up and speak out against injustice.
Your great granddaddy Bishop Duncan M. Gray, Jr. stood up to say a lot of risky, unpopular things as a white Mississippian during the Civil Rights Movement. He declared that segregation was incompatible with the Christian faith. This was at a time when Mississippi’s governor Ross Barnett challenged President Kennedy’s orders for integration, stating, ““I’m a Mississippi segregationist and I am proud of it.”
In the fall of 1962 during forced integration of the University of Mississippi campus, requiring 30,000 U.S. troops, federal marshals, and national guardsmen, your great granddaddy made his way through a violent riot on campus. He took bricks from people’s hands and implored them to go home. He held onto a Confederate monument where a large group had gathered and was pulled down into the crowd, where he was beaten. Two people died in that riot, and 300 were injured.
A week after the riot, Great Granddaddy said from the pulpit of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Oxford:
You and I didn’t go out there and throw the bricks and the bottles. You and I didn’t go out there and fire the guns. Yet you and I, along with every other Mississippian, are responsible in one degree or another for what happened. We are responsible for the moral and political climate in our state which made such a tragedy possible….The decent, respectable and responsible people of Mississippi have failed when events like those of last Sunday night can take place within our state.”
He received threats. He received pamphlets in the mail from the KKK. He was on the White Citizen Council’s watch list. He kept speaking. He kept acting.
You will grow up hearing these stories. Many people will smile when they find out you came from him. It may make you feel proud and secure in your goodness, secure in your standing against white supremacy. He did his work, though, and we have our own work to do. He never thought he was a hero; he did what he thought was necessary and right. We are proud to have known him and proud to share his name, but these stories happened over 50 years ago. We can’t keep proudly telling and associating ourselves with these stories without participating in the work before us today.
It’s our turn to get to work.
Son, I’m not going to write your future for you. I’m not going to lay out a path of what social activism should look like in your life and how you will do good in the world. I don’t know what your talents are and have only premonitions of what your personality and temperament may look like when you’re not a one-year-old. You get to decide what your life will be. I don’t want to put too much pressure on a life that is just beginning and is not mine to define and live.
I hope, though, that you will see your dad and me live in a way that plants deep in you the idea that we listen to the pain of the people around us, and we respond. I hope you grow comfortable enough with yourself to face your own shadows and the shadows of our history. I hope you grow the compassion to see that we belong to each other and have a responsibility to care for each other and can tell early on that the “we” extends far beyond our family and our nation.
You will have a choice many times to speak up in defense of someone who’s not in the room or to stay silent. You will have a choice to stand up for someone being mistreated or to look away. You will have a choice to laugh at or ignore a racist joke a friend makes or to say, “That’s not ok.” You will have a choice about where you live, how you make your money, and how you spend your money. You will have a choice about who your friends are and how you show love to the world.
Son, your life matters, and you will know it.
Your knowing will go further than your family’s love and presence. It will show itself in the news you watch, in the books you read, in the faces on the screen, in the twinkling smiles of white-washed Jesus. No one will have to tell you your life matters; you will know. You will know it in your waking and in your sleeping, and your value in this world will be affirmed, affirmed, affirmed.
Black children growing up in this very same city may not feel like the world believes their life matters. They turn on the TV and see another unarmed person with brown skin dead, shot by a person who was supposed to be protecting them. They turn on the TV and see mobs of angry white people with guns and torches, even KKK hoods and swastikas. They see the same flag with the stars and bars hanging from the state Capitol–the one they saw on TV carried by the men with hoods and torches. They drive down the street in their neighborhood and see more flags of oppression flying. They may wonder, “What does it mean? Does it mean they all hate me? Does it mean they will hurt me?”
Later they may get the feeling that a white person’s stubborn pride is more important than their family’s generations of unimaginable pain and suffering. They may feel like everyone will rush to protect the memory of their ancestors who fought in a war over 150 years ago, but who is fighting for the living now? Who is fighting for their life? They may see the men in their lives taken to prison and labeled “thugs”. They see statues in their city memorializing the “rebels” who raped their mothers and grandmothers and stole their children and whipped their bodies bloody, and together it will feel like a celebration of all that kept them in a status less than human. And they will know that this feels safe for many white people.
Black. Lives. Matter. We will say it, chant it, sing it, whisper it, shout it, cry it, pray it.
I don’t have all the answers, Love. I know there are areas where I’m failing and not doing as much as I could. But I will look for the ways I can do better, and then I will do better. You are watching and listening, and you hear what I have never said.
To my white son born in Mississippi, I have said what I know to say here. Now I will listen, too.
Photo credit: Josh Hailey Studio
I am sitting here filled with a powerful pride that I can say I know you. Your son is blessed to have the parents he has. Thank you for sharing your words with others. They make a difference. They are power-filled.❤️
…and also with you.
Thank you SO much for writing this. I plan to read it, and reread it regularly. And SHARE it!
This is gorgeous and poetic.
Catherine, I read your essay without first seeing your name. I was incredibly moved. When I read about Duncan Gray and saw your name I was even more touched. As a member of St. James, a Bratton Green alumnus, and a St. Andrews alumnus, I’ve known your family my entire life. Thank you for your words. Thank you for your courage.
Catherine, I wish you the best of luck with your newborn son! I found your article very interesting as I had a white male born in Mississippi who is now in college, and I honestly have to say his heritage didn’t give him any power over who he is today. His character did. Some of his best friends are African American & we have spent many years traveling with them & supporting them. He left a private school in Mississippi because they were in the mode of giving scholarships & playing time to minority students regardless of their talent, academics, or character. Because my son wanted an equal playing field regardless of color, income, etc., he then went to a 6A public school & started in the position that private school wouldn’t start him in. He now plays division 1 college football. He was also denied entry into some elite colleges because he was a white male. They wanted more students from a minority. I really do believe this nation today doesn’t discriminate because someone is African American. If anything, we are trying to give them chances that are almost impossible for an average white, male. As your son gets older, he will have to work harder than you realize, and I would think you will see the difference in Mississippi schools & families today vs. when you were younger. We all have to be responsible for our actions, whether we are black, white, male, or female.
Wait a few days and read this again, Elizabeth Hall. You have a path in front of you with many small forks and none of the choices will show much difference – there will be no choice where you pick a starkly different path, but you may still end up in vastly different places. I fear I’m coming across as an airbag (because I am not capable of Ms. Gray’s beautiful insight and writing), but if I am, just ignore me but please put this in the back of your mind and let it marinate for a while. Thanks.
“If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.”
— Margaret Mead
The author (and certainly others) are suggesting Ms. Hall that you are swimming, with unconscious privilege, in the waters of structural oppression/racism. You have not (yet) discovered the water surrounding us all, including your son.
Thank you for saying this. I hope people will consider what you said and really reflect on it. Hopefully they just won’t react negatively without really empathizing
Elizabeth Hall you speak from what you’ve experienced. have witnessed some of this as well. As for the writer of this article, I teach my sons the golden rule. To treat others as they want to be treated. And to do so with God guiding and guarding their hearts. They need not be taught to be prideful nor ashamed of who they are.
You have captured so many truths in ways that make them crystal clear. You have a huge heart and a way with words that make them sing and readers weep. Thank you so much for this!
Catherine,
You don’t know me. I encountered this incredibly moving and powerful piece quite by accident on social media today. My name is Pat, and I am an African-American woman, and mother to a 20-year old man. His name is David.
David means everything to me. And so it is probably not surprising that in our current political climate, I find myself shaken to my very core with fear. You see, David is 6 foot 3, and 240 pounds. He has a huge, powerful build; he’s muscular and I fear in the eyes of some even menacing. But he is truly, and I mean truly 240 pounds of pure love and sweetness.
David will hug a total stranger – just because. He’s been programmed to love on sight. He’s trusting, intelligent, thoughtful and blind to the racial biases that plague those of us who are members of older generations. His existence brings me the same beauty and joy that its clear your son brings you. But as you can imagine, my joy is tempered with a soul-crushing fear that you’d have to be a mother of a black man to understand.
A broken tail light. A late-night encounter in a convenience store parking lot. A call to the police by someone who thinks a party has gotten too loud. I, like most black mothers of young men in this country live with the constant fear of some random event putting our boys in harms way, pitting them against someone who sees them not for who they are, but because of the color of their skin, through a prism of irrational, unfair prejudices. It’s a horrible way to live as a mom.
But I have to tell you – your letter gives me hope. Further, what I’ve worked just as hard as you to pour into my son gives me hope. Like you, I have taught him that there is injustice, and his role in ensuring that he rises above it. And I can tell he’s listening – sometimes when I rant and rave about some of the racist actions of somebody in some news story, he calms me down/ He always remains fair and thoughtful in his assessment of what’s transpiring. He is proof that we can break the cycle of fear and hate, and so are you. Your son will grow up in the light and beauty of your wisdom and he will make the world a better place. And that’s all because of you.
Forgive the rambling letter, but I wanted to you let you know, that as a black woman, with a beautiful black man I’m trying to raise in a society that seems at times determined to see him as less than what he is, reading this letter to your son gives me a ray of hope. It really does. And for that, I thank you.
Pat Smith
This is wonderful. Thank you.
Thank you for this letter, Catherine. I am a Caucasian woman, and I can identify with so much of what you say. I was born and raised in Mississippi and lived there until 1973, when I moved to Virginia, where I still live.
My father was a United Methodist minister in the North Mississippi Methodist Conference until he passed away in 1989. I am proud that he, our church, and our family spoke up for civil rights during the Civil Rights Movement. It almost seems as if that was easier then than it is now. I am concerned that, as a nation, we are more divided now than we were in the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of the division appears to be because of both covert and overt racism.
I lived in Tupelo, MS, when I was in middle and high school. My graduating class was the first racially integrated class in my high school. I was an ardent advocate for fair treatment of everyone, regardless of race, creed, color, ability, or sexual orientation. I decided that I wanted to be a social worker and help overcome injustices when I “grew up.” I could see that we were making “progress” in racial relations in Mississippi, and that felt good.
After graduating from high school, I attended Millsaps College from 1968-72. I loved my liberal arts education and considered myself so fortunate to attend one of the best colleges in the Deep South. As students, we spoke up against racial injustice.
While at Millsaps, I decided to take a new African American friend home one weekend (my folks had moved to Pontotoc at that point). But I was shaken to the core when my folks told me that I couldn’t bring my friend to church. My parents told me that it wouldn’t be accepted by some church members. That was the moment I started questioning how people could call themselves Christians, yet not accept another person into their church because of the color of his or her skin.
My brother was a pre-ministerial student (Methodist) at Millsaps. He ran into even deeper racism than I did when he preached the ministry of love and acceptance of all races in the small, rural churches to which he was assigned as a student minister intern. He decided to abandon the ministry, never to return. Upon graduation, he moved to Massachusetts, where he still lives.
Until I read your letter, I am embarrassed to say that I never even thought about Major Millsaps being yet another symbol of a racist past that insidiously creeps into the present.
We must replace the Confederate symbols of our racist past with symbols of love and unity. We must do this as soon as possible. We must work even harder to understand and address “covert racism” in our country.
When I go South these days, it feels as if it is more racist than I ever remember it being. That makes me so sad. I have many warm memories of Mississippi, and I want to see and experience”progress.” More progress, not hateful, incendiary talk shows that flame the emotions. Those are the only stations I can get on the radio when I drive to Tupelo from the Memphis airport. I don’t want to see the “Confederate flag” embedded into the Mississippi flag. These things are not acceptable – no more than it was ever acceptable to treat people of color differently than white people.
Thank you again for your letter. I have so much more to say, but this is all for now. I just wanted to get a few things off my chest – and to thank you for helping me consider some “deeper” and “hidden” levels of racism that I hadn’t yet considered. You are part of the healing force that we desperately need in our nation and world.
Catherine, what a beautifully written piece to your precious son. It covers so much and says so much. I could not add a thing. Thank you for taking the time to write it. Ouida Drinkwater
What a wonderfully sensitive piece written about such a tough subject. I, too, am a Millsaps alumnus (1992) and do honestly believe that my time there was responsible for fashioning a productive and well-thought person of me.
You are right that race and gender leads to both advantage and disadvantage, and it is grossly unfair, I see it even more now that I live in a large city.
How do we correct it? One way is in contemplation of such wonderful prose as yours.
Thanks for writing it.
Good morning, I thought I commented yesterday but cannot find my note so please forgive me for repeating if it is visible on your side. You speak my heart in this article.
I was raised by parents who were both teachers, raised in bigoted household themselves but enlightened through education and fiercely determined to raise children to think critically. My father transitioned from far right deep southern Baptist, redneck conservatism to marching with Dr. King in Washington in the span of just a few years.
When my son, influenced by a teacher who was a Millsaps grad, became set in his determination to attend Millsaps I was not thrilled about the deep south location of the college. East Texas is not exactly though of as a bastion of tolerance and acceptance, but Jackson, Mississippi? However, strong in my belief that my husband and I helped to instill unflappable values, we helped emotionally and financially to make his choice possible.
It was an immediate good fit (despite the naming for a rebel Major, Millsaps is in fact true to it’s liberal arts name), and he played baseball and joined a stereotypical good ole boys fraternity, SAE. At the same time of the infamous incident in Oklahoma where a frat mom led an SAE chapter in singing “there will never be a (N-word deleted) in SAE
“http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/08/frat-racist-sae-oklahoma_n_6828212.html” my son was president of his SAE chapter in Jackson, Mississippi, and was leading the chapter through rush. A brave (for pledging) young African American, outstanding in accomplishments, character, academics, commitment to service, etc pledged the chapter. Admitting a black person to SAE was unprecedented. There was some minor resistance amongst the members. When word received the very powerful and societally well placed alumni, most of whom are doctors and lawyers and business leaders in Jackson and in cities nearby, to say there was backlash was an understatement. My son received threats, both immediate and personal, to threats affecting the chapter (We will close it down) and more threats mired deep into his professional future, “if you admit him, you will never do business in Mississippi. My son petitioned the active members to accept the pledge, explaining to them that there was not one damn viable reason to refuse membership, that the only reason would be hatred, bigotry, prejudice. He pushed and would not back down and the young man was admitted. The chapter is now integrated, and reflective of the demographics ethnically of the population of the college. My son has done some astonishing things in his young life; saved two high school students from death via alcohol poisoning, played all innings of a state championship baseball game (leading the team to a win) 30 hours after an appendectomy, and is now a successful corporate attorney who also serves as an court appointed advocate attorney for children, but there is nothing in his 26 year history of which I am more proud than his determination to stand up a centuries old system of established and condoned segregation and organizational hatred. You go mom, you are raising boys who will become men such as my son. Hatred is not inborn. It is taught. Attitude and perspective is nothing if not taken into action.
as a white mother of a black son, thank you thank you thank you. We are a blended family. I have a 20 month old white grandson…..this letter of yours will be shared with both of his parents. God bless you and your family. Sending you love from California.
Powerful truths. Thank you!
I swam those waters most of my life. The waters I now swim in the Chicago area are no less tainted. Your letter has moved me to face this reality. Thank you.
This is beyond beautiful. What a wonderful gift to your son.