James

“You know where we goin’?” the boy asked. “Ain’t got no idee. But we’s on our way.”

I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. The white so-called masters cannot embrace their cruelty and greed, but must look to that lying Dominican friar for religious justification. But I will not let this condition define me. I will not let myself, my mind, dro

gave a language lesson. These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency. The young ones sat on the packed-dirt floor and I was on one of our two homemade stools. The hole in the roof pulled the smoke from the fire that burned in the middle of the shack. “Papa, why do we have to learn this?”

White people often spent time admiring their survival of one thing or another. I imagined it was because so often they had no need to survive, but only to live.

At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subver

“Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.”

“And you’re colored,” she said. Norman nodded. “Who can tell?” “Nobody,” Norman said. “Then why do you stay colored?” “Because of my mother. Because of my wife. Because I don’t want to be white. I don’t want to be one of them.” Sammy looked at me. “That’s a pretty good answer.”

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,”

There were those slaves who claimed a distinction between good masters and cruel masters. Most of us considered such to be distinction without difference. I