Sublime

Citizenship being granted will be a kind of victory too, because you will not have died in any of the wars or massacres, you will have survived starvation and relocation, indoctrination and assimilation, you will have lasted long enough that they had to say that you too, our longtime, once mortal enemy, even you are one of us, even if its meaning,

Zhaanat’s knowledge was considered so important that she had been fiercely hidden away, guarded from going to boarding school. She had barely learned to read and write on the intermittent days she had attended reservation day school. She made baskets and beadwork to sell. But Zhaanat’s real job was passing on what she knew.

Each one volunteers to be eaten, so others might be spread far afield.

“But we are the good guys. Aren’t we, Uncle?” “I hope so. I hope we are.”

This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms.

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