A fragment of memory returned - recollection of myself as a youngster reading Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, her description of the Negro boy stopping along a lonely path to urinate. Now, years later, I was there in a role foreign to my youth’s wildest imaginings. I felt more profoundly than ever before the totality of my Negro-ness, the immensity of its isolating effects. The transition was complete from the white boy reading a book about Negroes in the safety of his white living room to an old Negro man in the Alabama swamps, his existence nullified by men but reaffirmed by nature, in his
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