In 2017, Dr. Kaye began a three-year in-depth ethnographic study
within Baltimore's Black Butterfly neighborhoods, documenting and
recording the community stories.
In
"you tell them that we're not invisible, you tell them that we
matter," she met someone from the Poe Homes community, who was
filling their pots and pans with water from the fire hydrant after
the community had gone four days without running water who asked Dr.
Kaye to tell her story so that she and the residents of the city
would be "unforgetten." This book is for her. It is also
for the veterans that Dr. Kaye met and profiled in her "baltimore
is my beirut," column who said, "You commit your life to
fight for this country, then you come back home and where you live is
worse than where you were fighting. It's like the war never ended."
It is for the ninth grader student who told Dr. Kaye in "i'm
from baltimore, i'm already dead," when she asked him what he
wanted to be when he grew up, "My father is dead. My brother is
dead. I had two cousins, they got shot. My uncles are locked up. What
do I want to be when I grow up? Nothing. I'm from Baltimore, I'm
already dead." It is also for her parents who grew up in Jim
Crow South Carolina and chose every day to survive and then when they
raised her, taught her how to thrive. My Mother's Tomorrow is
a love letter to Baltimore and a love letter to her sons. It is a
reminder to them both that even though they were born with wings,
Baltimore taught them how to fly.
