Whom did he love?

It must have been obvious even from a distance that the traditional hierarchy of parent and child was absent between us, as he carried himself more like a peer than a father, unburdened by paternal neuroses. And although I could tell he was happy to share the experiences of our outings with me, the sheer intensity of his focus—as joyful as it was m

And why does he never name the mother of his child, who presumably nursed him when things were bad, pressed pills out of their packets when he needed them most, washed him, held his body when it was pliant with sleep, saw the stitches dissolving in his spine?

She wanted faculty and students to join her and guide her in reclaiming and retrieving what had been broken into pieces and scattered to the wind—the sounds, sensibilities, wisdom, knowledge, and life strategies of multiple peoples made black by a colonialist brush. But no one understood this as theological work to be done.

How strange, I thought, looking upon his sad, kind face, that this man had once been my entire world, and yet we could come to no final understanding of one another. He was a man who’d done far more than most to end the suffering of a people whose toil was the very source of his power; he had risked his own good comfort, the love of his family, his