figured this might be the case months ago while preparing my full itinerary. When I first started phoning around Portsmouth to inquire about George Washington’s slave, I received the same reply in so many words as when I called other cities about unpleasant periods from their past. I heard it when I asked the Cincinnati Zoo about the exhibition of live Native Americans there in 1887; the Owensboro, Kentucky, chamber of commerce about America’s last public execution next to the old courthouse on August 14, 1936 (the circuslike atmosphere at the hanging mortified the nation); and the Sonoma
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