You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

I'm still divided in my principles and what I think is right and what I'm actually able to do, whether talking about writing or being a citizen or being a husband or being a father. And I'm trying to get better.

To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that's what we all understand.

Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.

Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing.