I had never had occasion to reflect before on the brilliance of the white strategy: blacks didn’t know each other, could barely speak to each other, and, therefore, could scarcely trust each other—and therefore, wherever we turned, we found ourselves in the white man’s territory, and at the white man’s mercy. Four hundred years in the West had certainly turned me into a Westerner—there was no way around that. But four hundred years in the West had also failed to bleach me—there was no way around that, either—and my history in the West had, for its daily effect, placed me in such mortal danger
...more
