The assignment:

Read “Recitatif” and write a letter to Toni Morrison in response. Include a moment of poetry, a reflection on an image, a reference to something else we’ve read, and a question.

The response (and the beginnings of the poem above):

Dear Ms. Morrison,

As I sit in my bed with a sleeping baby breathing the deep, milk-sweet breath of sleep an arm’s length from me, I’m struck at the way “Recitatif” has lingered in my mind since last night. Race is on my mind a lot these days as I raise biracial children in what so many people are quick to call a post-racial world. What do they even mean by “post-racial”? That they’ve passed the point where they themselves are willing to do it lip service anymore? that civil rights are won and it’s time for the oppressed to sit back and be grateful for what they have? that the mere existence of a biracial president for eight years absolved the country of four hundred years of racial atrocity? If we’re living in a society that has left its race problem in the dust, why are there brown babies in cages on our southern border? Why are prisons populated by people of color at a wildly disproportionate rate? Why does a racist, xenophobic, jingoistic tyrant have the support of forty percent of our nation’s citizens?

A picture from two years ago holds fast in my memory as I think of this “post-racial” America—a black officer standing before a barrier of yellow police tape. Behind him is a melange of hate: neo-Nazis carrying swastikas, the Confederate flag waving, visible vitriol in the air. But wait. There were good people on both sides, weren’t there? Post-racial indeed.

In “Enslaved City on a Hill,” Seth Moglen paraphrases historian Saidiya Hartman, who writes about enslaved people, primarily women, who were not only voiceless in their lives but are voiceless in their histories—our archives as violent in their silence as history was—and I’m left to again ponder and feel defeated by the cruelty of the history we share—my children, my students, my nieces and nephews on both sides, so many of my friends, my mother-in-law in particular, West African by way of South Carolina. And you. Your memory always fresh even as the world mourns you.

I began this missive with the intent of asking you one question: Is Twyla black and Roberta white, or Roberta black and Twyla white? But that’s the point, isn’t it?