Sublime

malaprop.

The laughter turns to groans. Blindness and unreason, rampant.

Square by square, I walked to a church. I’d been there twice before. But the details keep it from ever getting old. Outside there is a monument that was erected to the “Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue” of the Battle of Savannah during the American Revolutionary War. Eight hundred men from what is now Haiti alongside three thousand Frenchmen

Back in Brooklyn, a poet-nurse to the Union dying writes: A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. Jørgen never reads these words.

"Nec bella fuerunt, Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes." "Nor wars did men molest, When only beechen bowls were in request." "You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass—the

Jefferson in his racist generosity allowed that some infusion of European ancestry afforded Africans somewhat greater capacity, but it is quite clear he would have found me, credibly 81 percent African, lacking. I hold instead to what W. E. B. Du Bois said: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with

In 1964, eight years before I was born, my family moved from Titusville to Ensley. Ours was the third Black family on the block. And the last White man on our block, which changed from White to Black across a few years, diligently kept up a sign that read “Zoned for whites.” Each morning on the way to school, the neighborhood boys kicked it down.