The Water We Carry

As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.

Dearest America,

I was eleven years old when I watched Barack Obama take the oath of office, and I believed with my whole chest that you had decided to mean it.

I grew up a white kid in a neighborhood that was mostly Black and brown, in schools that were the same. I learned the most important things I know in those rooms, from people to whom you had given the least. In the sixth grade I had a teacher named Mr. Laurence, a Black man who taught Leadership. He chose me, the white kid, to keep his water cup full. I did it gladly. I was proud to be the one he chose. And in that same room, that same year, he played us Spike Lee's X and introduced me to Malcolm. The man whose water I carried put a prophet in my hands.

I did not understand, at eleven, what it meant for you to elect a Black president. I only knew that something had arrived. Something we had been promised was possible. Something that felt, that cold morning in January, like the distance between what you said and what you did had finally closed. I thought you had decided to pay what you owed.

You have been holding anniversaries of your founding for 250 years, and you are very good at it. The fireworks. The speeches. The long warm feeling of having lasted. You have made the marking of the occasion into an art. The paying for it you have never learned at all.

The pattern is not hidden. You declared freedom in 1776 with the auction blocks running in your streets. You freed the slaves and kept the forty acres for yourself. You passed the civil rights and let the repair go unpaid. Every time the moment came, the moment the grace would finally cost you something, you pocketed the inspiration and left the bill on the table. You kept the symbol and let go of the thing the symbol was for.

And you did it to the prophets too. This is the part that should keep you up at night. The men and women who stood in the gap, who told you the truth in language you could not pretend not to understand, who you called dangerous and radical and divisive for the sin of saying it out loud, you waited until they were safely dead and then you made them into decorations. Douglass on a stamp. Ida B. Wells on a wall. Their faces in every classroom and their demands in none of them. You took everything they asked of you and folded it down into something that asks you for nothing, and you called that honoring them.

Let me tell you what the other kind of grace looks like, because I have lived inside it. It looks like people who had been given nothing choosing to give me everything. I belonged to the country that shorted them, and they poured into me anyway. They gave me a tradition built to outlast a nation that would not keep its word, and they put it in my hands as though I had a right to it. They taught me how to love a country that had never once loved them back. I did not earn that and I could not have earned it, which is the whole nature of grace. It is never earned. It is only paid for. Somebody always pays.

You, America, have never paid. Your grace has never cost you a thing, and that is the precise reason it has never changed a thing.

I turn twenty-nine this summer, a few weeks after you turn 250. The belief that came to me on that January morning has never once left. Not when I grew old enough to feel the irony in a Black man choosing the white boy to carry his water. Not now, with the evidence against that belief lying everywhere I look. I keep believing anyway. That is either the most foolish thing about me or the only thing worth saying to you.

The people, when they decide to, can begin the world over again. That sentence is older than you are, and it means exactly what it says. Not on its own. Not by the turning of a calendar. When they decide. The deciding has always been the missing thing. Not the strength for it, not the wealth for it, not even the wanting of it in the abstract. The decision. The hour you stop performing the grace and start paying for it.

Most of the letters you receive this year will sing you happy birthday, and they should, because there is something here worth loving, something that has survived and that bends, on its best days, toward the promises it made. I love it too. I want you to hear that I mean it.

But I came here to ask you for the one thing you have spent 250 years refusing to give. I am asking you to mean it the way it was meant to me. To hand the country its own promise the way Mr. Laurence handed me Malcolm: freely, at your own cost, without waiting to be repaid.

I have carried that since I was eleven years old, and I am not tired yet. I will hand it to you the same way it came to me. All you have to do is decide to take it.

I am still here.

Are you?

With everything I have,

Grayson Royal, 28, Winston-Salem, NC