And I could not help but wonder if this triumphalism was born out of refutation—out of a need to prove that one’s people are not “animals” who have “ruined every country they ever entered.” I’d seen it all my life in the invocations of great kingdoms and ancient empires—a search for provenance and noble roots.

But for years after, as I turned the stories over in my mind, I could feel the revelations spinning out of them.

The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own.

When I think of my earliest days as a writer, what I recall is a kind of longing—I felt everything I wished to say, even if I didn’t exactly know it. There was so much I did not understand, and what I did understand I could never say with all the layers and color that would truly convey that understanding to my reader.

They didn’t have to worry. I’ve known too many “Yankee” racists and well-bred fools.

I know there are writers who can imagine a world from nothing. But I’m not one of them. The sense of beauty I was seeking had to emerge from knowledge.

If only I could be the one crafting the questions and organizing and interpreting the answers and then, with words, expressing the meaning I extracted from the quest.

We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West—a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises.

think that what we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world: orderly, organized, attentive to direction. There is nothing wrong with developing those skills—in fact, I’ve learned the hard way how useful they can be. What is wrong is their fetishization, the way they were allowed to outrank the actual body of