My partner—now my wife—loved our old Brooklyn neighborhood. We eventually had to leave after a dispute with our landlord, but we dreamed of moving back. We’d return to visit friends, and gentrification would always be Topic A. Prospect-Lefferts Garden was still black. But most of the young couples moving in were not. We didn’t have the money to move in back then, but that didn’t stop us from fantasizing. We imagined ourselves as aiding in the preservation of a black presence. But there were more personal reasons, too. We wanted to be closer to our friends in the neighborhood. And I wanted, in some tangible way, to reward my partner’s investment in me. I think that had a lot more to do with my insecurities than with her stated desires. We all carry our stories.

Between the World And Me was originally conceived under a different, far worse, title. It was supposed to be a compilation of Civil War essays. It was not supposed to be a big book. Writers don’t prepare for people to read them, so much as they prepare for no one to read them. Anonymity, not celebrity, is the usual result of slogging through a book, no matter how great it is. When celebrity came to me—and I must now admit that it has—a world was thrust upon me, one that I had, in so many ways, spent my life angled against.

Everything—good and bad--about Between the World And Me shocked the hell out of me. I was shocked that Toni Morrison agreed to blurb the book. I was shocked that Cornel West objected to this. I was shocked at how much my old homes—West Baltimore and Howard University—embraced the book. I was shocked to see bell hooks and Kevin Powell attacking it. I was shocked at how many white people read the book. I was shocked at how the fact of white people reading the book came to exert a kind of gravity. I was shocked that I lost some friends. I was shocked at how the book resonated with black and Arab people in France. One of the great moments of life was being in Paris, sitting in the 108 Café in the 19th, building with the people of the diaspora, and understanding that the old pan-African spirit had not yet died.

I was shocked at the royalties. But as soon as I saw them, I knew what I would do with them. I called my old buddy and asked him if anything was available in that neighborhood, in the Prospect Lefferts-Garden which we loved so much. I was thinking of finally being able to take all of our books out of storage. I was thinking of my mother, who would have a space of her own, and could come and stay for as long as she liked. I was thinking of my partner, who was by then my wife, and how much she had given me and made possible.

My friend found a house on Lincoln Road. He dubbed it “The Dream.” He told me my wife would love it. She did. I did. There was, by then, a storm around the book, people asking for crazy things, and offering crazier things, still. We thought we’d found a port in that storm. Unlike Park Slope, Fort Green, or Williamsburg, Prospect-Lefferts Garden had always been low-key. In our early years in New York, we felt like we were in on a secret.