WEBVTT

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A long time ago, there lived a Giant,

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a Selfish Giant, whose stunning garden
was the most beautiful in all the land.

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One evening, this Giant came home

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and found all these children
playing in his garden,

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and he became enraged.

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"My own garden is my own garden!"

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the Giant said.

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And he built this high wall around it.

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The author Oscar Wilde wrote the story
of "The Selfish Giant" in 1888.

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Almost a hundred years later, that Giant
moved into my Brooklyn childhood

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and never left.

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I was raised in a religious family,

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and I grew up reading
both the Bible and the Quran.

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The hours of reading,
both religious and recreational,

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far outnumbered the hours
of television-watching.

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Now, on any given day,
you could find my siblings and I

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curled up in some part
of our apartment reading,

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sometimes unhappily,

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because on summer days in New York City,
the fire hydrant blasted,

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and to our immense jealousy,
we could hear our friends down there

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playing in the gushing water,

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their absolute joy making its way up
through our open windows.

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But I learned that the deeper
I went into my books,

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the more time I took with each sentence,

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the less I heard the noise
of the outside world.

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And so, unlike my siblings,
who were racing through books,

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I read slowly --

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very, very slowly.

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I was that child with her finger
running beneath the words,

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until I was untaught to do this;
told big kids don't use their fingers.

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In third grade, we were made to sit
with our hands folded on our desk,

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unclasping them only to turn the pages,
then returning them to that position.

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Our teacher wasn't being cruel.

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It was the 1970s,

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and her goal was to get us reading
not just on grade level

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but far above it.

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And we were always
being pushed to read faster.

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But in the quiet of my apartment,
outside of my teacher's gaze,

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I let my finger run beneath those words.

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And that Selfish Giant
again told me his story,

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how he had felt betrayed by the kids
sneaking into his garden,

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how he had built this high wall,

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and it did keep the children out,

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but a grey winter fell over his garden

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and just stayed and stayed.

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With each rereading,
I learned something new

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about the hard stones of the roads
that the kids were forced to play on

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when they got expelled from the garden,

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about the gentleness of a small boy
that appeared one day,

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and even about the Giant himself.

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Maybe his words weren't rageful after all.

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Maybe they were a plea for empathy,

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for understanding.

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"My own garden is my own garden."

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Years later, I would learn
of a writer named John Gardner

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who referred to this
as the "fictive dream,"

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or the "dream of fiction,"

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and I would realize that this
was where I was inside that book,

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spending time with the characters
and the world that the author had created

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and invited me into.

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As a child, I knew that stories
were meant to be savored,

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that stories wanted to be slow,

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and that some author had spent months,
maybe years, writing them.

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And my job as the reader --

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especially as the reader who wanted
to one day become a writer --

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was to respect that narrative.

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Long before there was cable
or the internet or even the telephone,

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there were people sharing ideas
and information and memory through story.

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It's one of our earliest forms
of connective technology.

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It was the story of something
better down the Nile

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that sent the Egyptians moving along it,

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the story of a better way
to preserve the dead

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that brought King Tut's remains
into the 21st century.

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And more than two million years ago,

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when the first humans
began making tools from stone,

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someone must have said, "What if?"

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And someone else remembered the story.

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And whether they told it through words
or gestures or drawings,

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it was passed down; remembered:

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hit a hammer and hear its story.

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The world is getting noisier.

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We've gone from boomboxes

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to Walkmen to portable CD players

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to iPods

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to any song we want, whenever we want it.

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We've gone from the four
television channels of my childhood

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to the seeming infinity
of cable and streaming.

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As technology moves us faster and faster
through time and space,

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it seems to feel like story
is getting pushed out of the way,

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I mean, literally pushed out
of the narrative.

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But even as our engagement
with stories change,

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or the trappings around it morph from book
to audio to Instagram to Snapchat,

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we must remember our finger
beneath the words.

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Remember that story,
regardless of the format,

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has always taken us to places
we never thought we'd go,

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introduced us to people
we never thought we'd meet

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and shown us worlds
that we might have missed.

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So as technology keeps moving
faster and faster,

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I am good with something slower.

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My finger beneath the words
has led me to a life of writing books

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for people of all ages,

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books meant to be read slowly,

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to be savored.

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My love for looking deeply
and closely at the world,

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for putting my whole self into it,
and by doing so,

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seeing the many, many
possibilities of a narrative,

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turned out to be a gift,

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because taking my sweet time

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taught me everything
I needed to know about writing.

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And writing taught me everything
I needed to know about creating worlds

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where people could be seen and heard,

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where their experiences
could be legitimized,

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and where my story,
read or heard by another person,

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inspired something in them
that became a connection between us,

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a conversation.

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And isn't that what this is all about --

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finding a way, at the end of the day,
to not feel alone in this world,

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and a way to feel like
we've changed it before we leave?

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Stone to hammer, man to mummy,

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idea to story --
and all of it, remembered.

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Sometimes we read
to understand the future.

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Sometimes we read to understand the past.

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We read to get lost, to forget
the hard times we're living in,

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and we read to remember
those who came before us,

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who lived through something harder.

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I write for those same reasons.

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Before coming to Brooklyn, my family
lived in Greenville, South Carolina,

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in a segregated neighborhood
called Nicholtown.

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All of us there were
the descendants of a people

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who had not been allowed
to learn to read or write.

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Imagine that:

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the danger of understanding
how letters form words,

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the danger of words themselves,

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the danger of a literate people
and their stories.

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But against this backdrop
of being threatened with death

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for holding onto a narrative,

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our stories didn't die,

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because there is yet another story
beneath that one.

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And this is how it has always worked.

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For as long as we've been communicating,

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there's been the layering
to the narrative,

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the stories beneath the stories
and the ones beneath those.

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This is how story has and will
continue to survive.

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As I began to connect the dots
that connected the way I learned to write

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and the way I learned to read

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to an almost silenced people,

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I realized that my story was bigger
and older and deeper

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than I would ever be.

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And because of that, it will continue.

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Among these almost-silenced people

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there were the ones
who never learned to read.

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Their descendants, now generations
out of enslavement,

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if well-off enough,

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had gone on to college,
grad school, beyond.

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Some, like my grandmother and my siblings,
seemed to be born reading,

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as though history
stepped out of their way.

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Some, like my mother, hitched onto
the Great Migration wagon --

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which was not actually a wagon --

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and kissed the South goodbye.

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But here is the story within that story:

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those who left and those who stayed

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carried with them
the history of a narrative,

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knew deeply that writing it down wasn't
the only way they could hold on to it,

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knew they could sit on their porches
or their stoops at the end of a long day

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and spin a slow tale for their children.

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They knew they could sing their stories
through the thick heat of picking cotton

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and harvesting tobacco,

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knew they could preach their stories
and sew them into quilts,

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turn the most painful ones
into something laughable,

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and through that laughter,
exhale the history a country

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that tried again and again and again

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to steal their bodies,

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their spirit

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and their story.

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So as a child, I learned
to imagine an invisible finger

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taking me from word to word,

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from sentence to sentence,

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from ignorance to understanding.

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So as technology continues to speed ahead,

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I continue to read slowly,

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knowing that I am respecting
the author's work

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and the story's lasting power.

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And I read slowly to drown out the noise

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and remember those who came before me,

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who were probably the first people
who finally learned to control fire

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and circled their new power

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of flame and light and heat.

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And I read slowly to remember
the Selfish Giant,

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how he finally tore that wall down

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and let the children run free
through his garden.

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And I read slowly to pay homage
to my ancestors,

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who were not allowed to read at all.

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They, too, must have circled fires,

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speaking softly of their dreams,

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their hopes, their futures.

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Each time we read, write or tell a story,

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we step inside their circle,

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and it remains unbroken.

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And the power of story lives on.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)