Stained.

I'm sitting at my laptop studying photos of Booker's Place.  They were taken by the Greenwood Police Department the morning after my grandfather was shot.  My eye kept going back to something on the floor.  It looks as though he had concrete flooring, but part of it looked strange.

I realized that it was wet.  There's a long, wide path of moisture as if someone had tossed buckets of water on the floor.  In the middle of the water stain is a thin, red circle. It looks like an outline from a blood puddle that someone tried to wash clean.

I feel like I might throw up.

No More Homeschooling

I'm not homeschooling anymore.  Just typing that was like lifting the world off of my shoulders and watching it crash into the ground.  An Atlas shrug.  I can list a thousand reasons why I stopped, but then it would be like I was trying to justify my decision to you.  Suffice it say, it was a decision long in the making.  It was painful.

Homeschooling was more than a school choice, it was a way of life.  It was the sound of feet pounding through my house all day.  It was spontaneous hugs, kisses, and cuddles.  Now, it's gone.  Of course, my kids aren't gone. I still get to have them with me in the afternoons.  I enjoy them even more because now, I get to miss them.

Maybe they'll go to school for one year or ten.  I don't know.  What I do know is that I feel better.  Slower, refreshed, and less like the entire future of my children's lives is resting on how I spend every moment of every day.  It turns out that I'm not the mom I thought I was.  I strove to be her, but she was always just beyond my grasp. I really am this other mom.  A mom who wants a career.  A mom who can say good-bye to her kids every morning.

I have to be honest and authentic or I will be crazy.  So, here I am, doing what I love to do, doing what I have dreamed of doing - I am writing, and the only sound in the house is the whirring water that's racing in circles inside of my dishwasher.  I miss my children, but not enough to bring them back home, yet.  Which mom am I, again?  Oh, yeah, I'm the happy one.

Literacy

My son was recently diagnosed with dyslexia.  This came after I'd spent years homeschooling him and trying every reading method that I could get my hands on. At first I thought the problem was him, that he wasn't trying hard enough because he preferred to play with his toys than to do school with mommy.  Then, I thought it was me, and that I was just not a good enough teacher.  Finally, I became convinced that I just needed to find the right curriculum.

One day last year, we were doing school and it was like I was seeing him for the first time.  Something was wrong and it wasn't me, it wasn't him, and it wasn't the curriculum.  He could read on grade level, and he had excellent comprehension, but it was devastatingly difficult for him.  To read an entire paragraph he had to hit himself, pinch himself, and would usually cry out, but only after first exhibiting reluctance and anger.

In my house, dyslexia looks like a bad little boy.  It looks like ADD.  It does not look like a bonafide disorder.  When it was first recommended to me that I take him in to get tested for dyslexia, I was taken aback to discover that neither my insurance, or our local school district, recognized it as its own individual disorder.  We would have to pay out of pocket to save our son from illiteracy.

Thankfully, we can.  We're not rich, but we have investments and excellent credit. We could lose our house paying for his treatments, but we can still pay.  For some families, the cost may as well be in the millions as opposed to the thousands. Some families would never, ever be able to come up with the hourly rate required to get their children the help that they need.

I tend to feel sorry for myself.  When bad things happen, I often look to the sky and wonder what I've done to deserve the most recent calamity that's come into my life. The older I get, the more that I realize it's not all about me.  Nevertheless, when my son received his diagnosis I fell into a sad and fear-filled silence.  For days I wanted to ask why this had happened to my boy.  Why was such a sweet, smart child afflicted with a disorder that makes most people believe that they're dumb.

As I was having these thoughts, I was also thinking about the best way to build the board for Booker's Place, the new non-profit that I'm planning to launch this year, with the help of Lynn Roer from Ogilvy and Mather.

There are two grown men in my family who cannot read.  Booker was also illiterate, that makes three (one of them is a blood relative of Booker's).  There are some who believe that dyslexia is genetic.  I have to wonder if it runs in my family? I read here that African-American dyslexics are more likely to be misdiagnosed as being mildly mentally disabled than their white counterparts.

Are dyslexics whose skin is a little darker and whose families have little money, less likely to get a proper diagnosis?  The doctor who diagnosed my son charged $190 an hour.  They said there was a chance insurance may not cover it.  The testing lasted four hours.  How many families can afford that?

The timing of all of this - getting the diagnosis while starting Booker's Place, has made me wonder if I can incorporate dyslexia treatment into the free services we provide.  School supplies are great and necessary, we will still do that.  Learning to read, in this society however, is like learning to breathe.  It's all but impossible to thrive without it.

I am finding myself having another wildest dream.  What if I could hire a dyslexia specialist or a reading specialist to work in a city and travel between Booker's Place locations, providing specialized reading programs to underprivileged kids?  Maybe they could even make house calls.  It would be really expensive, but it would change the world, one struggling reader at a time.  It may also be what Booker Wright would do.

Booker's Place: The Movement

I'm learning that in life, it's important to dream big dreams.  Five years ago, I said that I wanted the world to know about Booker Wright.  This past July, Dateline NBC aired an hour long special about him.  There's talk about partnering with an educational company to make our movie, Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, available for schools to purchase.  That means that kids around the country might be taught the story of Booker Wright while they're learning about Medgar Evers and Rosa Parks.  My wildest dream is coming true.  So, why stop there.  I'm having another, incredibly wild dream.

Blogging about it now feels incredibly nuts, because this dream is in its infancy. The edges of it are fuzzy and none of the details have been worked out.  But, like I've said more times than I can count, this blog space is nothing more than a record of my Booker Wright journey.  So, here's my new dream:

A couple of weeks ago, a woman who is now my HERO, called with an amazing idea.  Her name is Lynn Roer and she is the Director of Moving Images, Alternative Content and Events at Ogilvy and Mather (whew, that's a mouthful) - Ogilvy and Mather partnered with Raymond De Felitta to help produce our film.  Lynn had this great idea about turning Booker's Place into a place for school children who may need school supplies, a bite to eat, or even free tutoring.

This is the perfect way to honor my grandfather's legacy for one reason - he was all about education.  Booker Wright didn't get to go school because he had to work to support his family.  He entered adulthood without literacy.  Not being able to read never sat well with him.  I've heard that, a few years before he was murdered, Booker hired a tutor and he finally achieved his lifelong dream of learning to read.

I've met scores of adults who knew Booker when they were kids and they all describe a man who was a broken record when it came to talking about the importance of getting an education.  He even held back money from the paychecks of some of his employees, only to hand them a wad of cash when it was time for them to go out and buy school supplies.  He bought a bus to drive kids from outlying farming towns into Greenwood so that they could attend Head Start and on and on.  You see why I love him, so.  He was a great man, even when no one was watching.

The original idea was to re-open Booker's Place in Greenwood, Mississippi.  The wild idea is to have a Booker's Place in every state and, one day, in every major city.  Booker's Place could be a corner or a bookshelf in a library with free school supplies.  It could be a place to call and make an appointment for free tutoring.

The point is that lots of kids slip through the cracks because they can't even come up with the basics.  My kids recently went to public school for the first time and I was amazed at all the stuff I had to buy for them - it was not cheap and I know that a lot of families simply can't carry the financial burden.

So, come on, let's start a movement.  Please don't think that all you can do is provide money.  Talk about this.  Facebook about it.  Get the people you know energized.  We'll need supplies, volunteers, ideas, and influence, but more than anything, we'll need you to care and to stay engaged.

Click here to sign up for my newsletter.  I'll be sending out updates on Booker's Place each month to let you know how we're doing and to ask your help in getting the word out.

Shouldn't every kid get a fair shot at an education?  Join with me, to do all that we can to make that happen.