There is a poem on my desk. It has sat in my sightline for years — Max Ehrmann's Desiderata, given to me by a monk who taught me college chemistry. By now I read past most of it the way you stop hearing a clock. But one line I never stop reading: You have a right to be here.

I have been thinking about that line, and about a man who decided it wasn't true.

Marcus Garvey looked at America and concluded the promise would never be kept for people who looked like him. He was not wrong about the evidence. He built the largest movement Black America has ever raised, gave millions a flag and a spine, told a mighty race to get up. And then he pointed at the ocean. The answer, he said, is to leave — take the ships back across the water and build the nation somewhere America isn't.

I understand the ledger he was reading. I have read it too. My judgment is that it was the wrong love.

Because my people were here before the Mayflower. The first of us came ashore at Point Comfort in 1619, a year before the Pilgrims touched Plymouth. When the families who now wave the Mayflower as their pedigree were still at sea, my stock was already on this ground, already working it. So I have never understood the instruction to depart. Depart to where? This is the land. There is no "back." To leave would be to agree with the oldest lie ever told about me — that I am a guest here, on someone else's paper, and can be sent home.

I hold older paper than that.

I keep a shelf for the ones who understood this. Most of my books I arrange by idea, unrelated things set as neighbors so they collide when I pass. One shelf I keep differently — by voice. Douglass is on it, and Baldwin, Ellison, King, Morrison, Coates. They disagreed about nearly everything: how to fight, whether to forgive, what to build. Lay their politics on a table and they go to war. But they share the one thing the shelf is sorted by, and it is not agreement. It is that every one of them loved this country.

That is the part people miss. They read the anger and call it hatred. It was never hatred. You do not write those books about a country you have given up on. You write them about the one you refuse to stop believing in. When Frederick Douglass stood up on the fifth of July, 1852, and asked what the Fourth was to the slave, he was not tearing the Declaration down. He was holding America to its own signature — praising the founders, then turning their words back on them, because the words were his too. All men are created equal is a promise, and the whole shelf is the long labor of making the country keep it.

That is the tradition I read from, and the one I stand in. Not the exit. The staying. The more perfect union — the country's own phrase for the thing that is never finished and is always ours to finish.

So I keep two things on my desk, where I have to see them every morning. The Desiderata, and its line: you have a right to be here. And a few sentences from Dr. King on what freedom actually is — not the absence of restraint, but the power to decide, and to answer for the deciding.

Read together, they are the whole of it. You belong here. Now choose, and carry the weight of the choice.

I belong here. This is my land — by a title older than the Mayflower, and by a right no one grants and no one can revoke. I am not leaving my own house because some of its rooms are broken. I am staying to fix them, because they are mine to fix. That is not resignation, and it is not grievance. It is love — the clear-eyed kind, the kind that has read the whole indictment and stays anyway.

You have a right to be here.

So do I. And I am not going anywhere.