In Walter’s home, there is a box with a letter that Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to Toussaint L’Ouverture. And in another, letters Romare Bearden wrote to a lover. There’s a first edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, which is perhaps the most significant slave narrative written by a woman. His version was the pseudonymou

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November 5, 2006

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, m

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The most painful part is this: we mix and move and cross fates and link them. We are cast down and pushed aside in so many different ways, and yet so often we cling tightly to even the most fragile benefits of being located above the darkest of whichever plantation economy into which we were born. We don’t have to do that. There are so many more of

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