To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.

Racism is a virus. And since nobody's really looking too hard for a cure it reproduces itself over and over again.

It was important, I know, for my father as a product of his times not to be vulnerable, so he chose, and I can't say that I blame him, to live his life rather than create it.

My mother used to do all the things that were important to her after midnight. ... Sometimes I'd sneak downstairs and see her knitting, or reading, or writing letters. I'd think of her as a thief, stealing the tail end of the day, the hours nobody else wanted or used.

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.

Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession ain't solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book you're off the hook.

I quickly learned that motherhood was a high wire act sometimes performed without a net.