Excerpt from the book FATHERS

“…his fathering was a game of beating the clock, trying to inscribe as much wisdom in into his son’s mind as he could before he was ‘called home,’ as his people down in Georgia would say. This sense of fragility, the mortal awareness of the passing hours, is common among us.
We know—we cannot help but know—that the lives of black men in this country die in the most arbitrary and unpredictable ways.

Thus to us, the word ‘father’ connotes an act of profound optimism. Defiance.”

- Jelani Cobb, historian