I suspected, however, that on many other levels, on the level of lived experience for example, Will and I were far freer than Shadrach and Cora and Pappy and all those generations of blacks who came before us. That this was true seemed tough to deny, and the more I thought about it, the more the matter produced in me feelings that were not unlike guilt. Not the guilt you have when you do something wrong, but the guilt you have when you are given something you don’t necessarily deserve or haven’t earned by your own efforts.
