I am my brother's keeper; his teacher. My duty in any time or circumstance is to learn and protect him so he may live to do the same. To finally accept this reality, it took me quitting graduate school because I was unsure of where its lessons were steering me, locking myself away in my house for four months, oblivious to my family and the social network I've created the last five years. My four months in isolation were lonesome and miserable, with my couch and television set my only security and my most gruesome, benign enemies. I dialogued with no one but my younger brother and the spirit in the essays and stories of James Baldwin. I read and reread Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, Going to Meet the Man, The Amen Corner and a collection of forgotten essays and magazine articles. I read because James accepted his responsibility to write truth as he saw it. During my silence, I also listened to the honest, Baldwin-like, black consciousness delivered by hip-hop artist Mos Def --conscious hip-hop is the faint, sustaining sound of America’s liberation.

On his CD Black on Both Sides, Mos translates the underground genius of being a bygPRO--young, gifted, black and proud-- in the temperate intellectual climate and lukewarm societal discourse of our time. His voice strains with the frustration of informing folks who no longer find value in the commerce of truth. Like James, Mos Def understands he has an obligation to teach the unconscious among us and shine a light into the darkness/ 'cause there's a lot of darkness out there.

I willfully accept my human responsibility to pass on what little light I can now shine on life. We're all lights, teachers, MCs, cultivators, alive with experiences to share: all guidebooks to a better or worse humanity. The lesson plans, curricula, scope and breath of my education classes did not come close encompassing the teacher I need to be. There is little information in education courses that sheds light on my brother's challenge to become a decent human being in the twenty-first century, aware of the power in his black body, unafraid nor held back by anything America's fractured, historical discourse will bequeath his adolescent understanding. Furthermore, there are no lesson plans for what I have always wanted to do in life; Lead.

So here I go.

Oronde Ash

bygpowis@hotmail.com

orondeash@mac.com