If You Come Softly

Ellie wakes to the sound of her mother, Marion, calling to her from the bottom of the stairs. Ellie was “dreaming of Miah” (1). Marion continues to try to wake her daughter up, while Ellie thinks back to the fall, when Jeremiah was new in her life. At the time, when Marion asked if there was a boy, Ellie lied and said there wasn’t. Now she thinks, “There isn’t a boy,” “not anymore” (2). Ellie finally tells Marion that she dreamed about Jeremiah. Marion tells her, “Remember what you can, Elisha” (2).

Jeremiah, a Black boy in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, feels “warm inside his skin, protected” (5). Yet, when he steps outside his neighborhood, the weight of his skin becomes heavier. He grew up around different ideas of what it was to be Black. The light-skinned and dark-skinned boys in his neighborhood all ragged on each other, but they still felt safe and connected. His grandmother, when she was still alive, would make Jeremiah sit in the shade because she didn’t want him to “get too black” (6). His dad would tell him “Miah, you’re a black man. You’re a warrior” (8). His mother would call for her “beautiful brown-eyed, black baby child” and Jeremiah would come running (10).