But educating those folks is not Perry’s primary aim; instead, “Breathe” centers on black endurance. Her book offers her children an elixir of history, ancestry and compassion, which, together, become instruction. She shares a childhood memory of the grotesque as prologue: a brilliant teacher who repeatedly singled her out for mockery and degradation while white classmates looked on. “They were disciplined into passive acceptance, into reaping the rewards, while I was humiliated over and over again. … Bewildered at the idea that they might have something asked of them to disrupt the hideous truth. This is what you are surrounded by. Silent witnesses.”

She reckons with how to stay in control when the news routinely offers a one-two punch: Black children are harmed and the wrongdoers go free. “Feeling deep love and complete helplessness to protect the beloveds is a fact of black life.” In one sobering passage, she imagines what could have happened to her teenage sons when a tripped alarm summoned the police to their home one night. What if an officer had mistaken one of her boys for an intruder? She admits readers may find this “melodramatic.” But whether a son would have been gunned down in his own home is beside the point; the stress of worrying accumulates and becomes its own specter: “Hypervigilant panic is our misfortune.”

Yet life is the gift Perry offers her sons, not fear or helplessness. “I cannot clip your wings. … No, I want your wingspan wide.” “Breathe” is a testament to her long game, a refusal to let unwarranted and unpunished death frighten her sons from truly living. She steers them away from the belief that an admirable life depends on achieving professional and economic status: “The greatest legacy you come from, to my mind, is of the people who found meaning beyond the doors of universities or the luster of careers. Who were themselves, even in the tiniest of ways, when there was hardly any place to be.” Perry heeds the words of a Zen priest who speaks of “freeing oneself of the white mind, of its overwhelming method of seeing and interpreting, as a means of getting closer to truth.” “Breathe” models the practice.

Perry never reveals specific harms that her sons have endured, which is the book’s transcending quality; it is not about them. Instead, she insists that all black children be treated with dignity and kindness. Here her voice takes on an oracular quality: “Like the phoenix, in you the ancestors come again, rise from the curling red and gray ashes underneath lynching trees. … That is what black reincarnation is. The debt is still owed. We keep making generations to collect our inheritance.”