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The Ocean Refuses No River
Without CDD Books, Walk with Us would probably not have become a published ISBN-toting book. Too much white guilt, agents said (in it or in them – I wasn’t sure); too heavy. But I don’t want to write about that. I don’t want to thank The Center for the Study of White American Culture for starting a publishing branch, Crandall, Dostie and Douglass Books. I don’t even want to thank CDD Books for choosing my book. What I do want to do, I think (and it’s late, Jeff having handed me this strange assignment of reporting about myself last minute) is to explain how the book became a different book after publication, because of publication in a white anti-racist context. Write about how the book, Jeff suggested, is or isn’t carrying out the mission you had for it. Mission?! the formalist in me yelped, the art-for-art’s-sake poet who cheered Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own as she chastised Charlotte Bronte for the character-breaching flights of anger allowed Jane in Jane Eyre. Fiction, art, real art, brooked no agendas, no political messages, certainly no mission.
I did not write in a vacuum. I had heard about reparations, but what interested me as a writer of narrative was that apex moment when the heart is opened and a lever is turned and one craves justice – not persuaded but reborn. Later I would learn the arguments. And like other white anti-racists learn to maneuver through the obstacle course of denial some portion of my audiences always, always threw together with amazing skill and speed, so that by the time I was done reading they would be a safe distance away from the hand reaching to turn the lever.
Writing the book changed me; publishing it changed me more. I saw, first, how very much work there is to do, that the masses of whitefolks are sleepwalkers sorely afflicted with what Cornell West calls a dangerous innocence – dangerous, and very old, as old as this nation. And I saw, too, that ways have been found to carry forward this work, and that the workers are daily evolving new ways. The stream my little raft rides is rising. If a book is written yet finds no publisher, is it a book? Of course, perhaps even a good one. But if it finds no movement to merge with, it has no mission. Jane Eyre won readers for its drama and brilliant characterization. Later, the second wave of feminism carried it into a wider channel. The anger Woolf judged a literary lapse spoke for and merged with that movement. When I see on the cover of Walk with Us the names of three abolitionists, two of them early white anti-racists and one of those two a martyr, I begin to think of words like movement and mission on a grander scale. And I begin to admit, formalist that I am, loving Faulkner for his serpentine sentences no less than Morrison and her cornucopia of concrete details, that perhaps I did, in writing the book, have a mission. To be human, as Prudence Crandall, A. J. Dostie and Frederick Douglass were human: fully. On our best days, isn’t that what we want for all whitefolks? And we shall have it. For the ocean, as the song goes, refuses no river. All the river has to do is keep flowing. As for the dams (I can’t shake this metaphor!) – it’s for you to name them and dismantle them. For us.
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Every movement needs its media. Can you have a movement without means to report and build it? Without the broadsheets and hastily typeset pamphlets, the flyers and magazines, the clandestine radio stations and sensor-dodging websites? Maybe you can, but judging from their efforts the forces opposed to change seem to assume you can’t. 
I tried to tell a story. If it’s a story white allies relate to then maybe it’s a story of becoming a white ally. But I didn’t think of it that way, or even know the term then. I got up in the morning, wrote, walked, missed the triplets, wrote, worried about their parents, slept, got up, wrote, second-guessed myself ad nauseam, earned some money, and so on. Alone in the woods for four years. I spelunked the caves of white guilt and hiked the steep trails of self acceptance because that was the stuff my life had given me. I had to write my way through that or die. Or so it felt. My suspicion that other white people may have covered similar terrain was not confirmed until I met WACAN. Had I known of WACAN before writing the book I may not have had to write it. Isolation was inspiration, in a sense: if I don’t witness to all this, who will? (At least one person at each reading, I have found.)
So the book didn’t start with a mission, but it merged with one. It’s a clod of dirt that fell into a stream. Or, no – it did just win an award didn’t it? – it’s a makeshift raft that fell into a stream. The stream has the mission: to reach the sea. Call the sea justice, equality realized, call it whitefolks no longer “needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on [us] . . . just one in the number,” as Bernice Johnson Reagon wrote it, to “stand against tyranny” (“Ella’s Song”).