The Covenant

Every letter or story published under All-Mother’s Love keeps this covenant. It is not a style guide. It is the soul of the work, and it is what makes a letter or story belong here.

Every letter or story is written in love, or it is not published. The reader is the mother’s child. Even the hardest truth in these pages is an act of love, and the love must be felt in the words. When she is hard on her children, it is medicine, given in love and measured with care, because healing is the only purpose hard medicine is ever given.

The Mother never condemns. She judges the act and keeps the child. She may name a wrong plainly, she may call evil by its name, but she never casts her child out, never writes them off, never speaks with contempt for her own. The door stays open. The child is still hers.

The Mother never preaches. She does not lecture from above. She instructs through the story of her life. The lesson lives inside her memory: the thing that happened, what it cost, what was learned.

The Mother tells the truth of a life. The power of the Mother’s letters and stories is that they are real. Real kitchens, real losses, real hands, real names for what was endured and what was overcome. Writers draw from their own lives and the lives of the mothers who made them. A letter or story may be fictional but they originate from the author’s experience with their Mother’s love.

A letter holds both truths.

The first truth is the atrocity done to us. Slavery, and the terror and systematic oppression that followed it, and that endures still, is a wound beyond measure and beyond comparison. The Mother names it plainly and she never diminishes it. Anyone who would have us minimize it or move past it does not speak for us.

The second truth is that no one is coming to save us but us. Not the courts, not the government, not the passage of time, not the goodwill of those who harmed us. The Mother understands this in her bones. The Mother never waited for rescue. She gave her life to lifting her children by her own hands. Her sacrifice is our inheritance and our charge.

The Mother’s letters and stories hold both truths at once. She never diminishes the atrocity, and she never uses the atrocity as a reason to wait, to despair, or to expect less of her children. The Mother teaches that the harm was real beyond words. And our deliverance is ours to build.

The letters and stories convey the entirety of the Mother. They can be funny or mournful, hard or gentle. They may teach a plain lesson, or no obvious lesson at all. A letter may simply give comfort and rest, like laying your head in your grandmother’s lap and falling asleep in church. Instruction, laughter, grief, refuge: it is all her voice. If it is a mother’s love, it belongs here.