I have big rolls of stickers. I put this one up a couple days ago by the FDR by the East River. I just walked by it.

Can I tell you that it rained today halfway into my hour on Chambers Street holding my sign and I was down in the subway station entrance putting the sign back into the Kinko’s bag I tote it in before I got my train back to my apartment when a guy I see sometimes going to work in the Dept of Education building came up to me and said, ‘You’re in their dreams.’

From Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, part of a paragraph about how the enslaved people reacted to their bondage:

‘African Americans understood they were at war, and reacted accordingly: running away, rebelling violently, fleeing to the British, murdering slave-catchers, and—less spectacularly, though more significantly—refusing to work, breaking tools, bending a Christian God to their own interpretation, stealing back the fruits of their labor, and, in covert corners of their world, committing themselves to the illegal act of learning to read.’

                                    'Once you learn to read, you will be forvever free' 

                                                                                                            ― Frederick Douglass

I feel a failure after I
talk to someone who
stops to ask
why are you here every day
holding this sign?
I see you every day they say.
I say too much at them trying
to say it just right when
the sign says it all
really.

I'm reading this now. Coates's voice is so rich, his knowledge so wide, what he writes about is so close to his life, so important to him, you can almost feel him breathing. It makes for an exciting reading experience. You may have read his earlier book, Between The World and Me. If you don't know anythng about him, Google him, look at him on YouTube. He reminds me why I hold the sign. He gets me up and out in the morning. Books can do that.