When I was maybe ten, I dressed up as a hobo for Halloween. The costume was probably a matter of convenience—we had the items on hand, no need to buy or make anything—but my family had a romanticized notion about what a hobo was. My dad and granddad grew up envying the idea of freedom, of escape—from picking cotton or from poverty or from annoying siblings. I believed it when I was told how fun it must have been, riding on the rails from town to town, taking the day as it came, no responsibility. I never thought about how a homeless person would eat; what he’d have to do to make money, find food; I never realized how dangerous and dehumanizing homelessness could be.

Hobos were a funny, romanticized notion.

I know better now, of course. There’s nothing funny or romantic about homelessness. And I hate that in my youthful ignorance, I made light of something so serious.

Here’s the more insidious issue, though:

Hobos weren’t real to me. They were some fairy tale, not real people. They were just props in a story. It’s not just that the blackface of Virginia politicians is hurtful because it recalls minstrel shows where African-Americans were denigrated and simplified into the worst possible stereotypes; it’s hurtful because the people painting their faces in the ‘80s were treating black people like caricatures. Cartoons. They weren’t thinking of black people as real, as having the same hopes and dreams, the same brains and hearts and families and souls as a white person.

That’s the bigotry I want to work on, for myself and for all the liberal whites in America.

Notes: Don’t just take my word for it, please. Seek out the voices of people of color and listen to what they’re saying. Also, this blog post in no way is meant to equate homelessness, which is often a crisis for the people experiencing it, to being a black person.

News: Navarro Suarez, my short story prequel to Dry Run is available for purchase on Amazon! Read on to learn more about it!

Family first.
In a bleak future destroyed by climate change, family is all that matters to Navarro. He'll do anything to protect those closest to him, including violate his own moral code. Then one bloody day, he finds himself the caregiver of a fragile boy who threatens everything Navarro holds dear. He knows what he has to do. The only question is, can he do it?

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