A Letter To My Mother — Just In Case

A few years back, when I called Clemson, South Carolina home, I drafted a letter to my mother – "just in case" – leaving her instructions in the event of my death.

Despite being relatively healthy, death, at the time, didn't seem like an impossibility. As a Clemson University doctoral student, I had been receiving death threats and harassment because of my work highlighting the school's willingly whitewashed history. (For my dissertation album, I had written a song about how Clemson memorializes white supremacists while discounting the contributions of enslaved people and sharecroppers.) And as a Black man living in these United States of America, the more general possibility of being found dead, unexpectedly, with no explanation or rationale, has never seemed outside the realm of possibility.

On top of that, a teenager from a nearby town had recently been killed at the hands of police. Despite public outcry and evidence that seemed to indicate wrongdoing, nobody was charged with his death. That official explanation, a homicide with no culprit, was accepted by all but a few.

So I thought about what I'd want my family and friends to do if I were ever in that situation. And I began to draft a letter:

It was easy, albeit heartbreaking, to get a first draft on paper—local, national, and international stories provided instance upon instance necessitating such., who died while in custody at the Macon County Jail. And there'd been Michael Brown the summer before. And Sandra Bland that same year, who police said had killed herself while being held in a local jail cell.