had told my mother that I did not want to see him because I hated him,” he wrote of his stepfather in “Notes of a Native Son.” “But this was not true. It was only that I had hated him, and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin: It was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
