![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I am observant, distant, often passive-but always negotiating for the positive. It was they, of course, not I, who freely chose! For some years, I was but one of a few black children, often the only boy, in whatever I endeavored, and so I developed a detached sensibility that I think has aided me in my writing. The break came in 1967, when, as a preface to the forced racial integration of the schools, my parents enrolled my sister and me in the Freedom of Choice plan that brought about limited integration of the white schools. Even so, the opportunities were limited-restricted, actually-as the segregated school system clung on in rural Virginia. Study was allowed to be broad, but the expectation was always for hard work and success. ![]() Perhaps because Jim Crow had so badly deprived them (Read Huston Diehl’s Dream Not of Other Worlds), my parents took educating their brood with seriousness and intent. So it was with some optimism that my parents, a refrigeration mechanic and a textile worker, looked upon their first-born of six. Board, and so, in regard to the potentialities of my life, the umbra of whatever shadow Jefferson and his cronies might have cast was beginning to lighten. It was 1955, just a few months after Brown v. In truth, the shadow of that little mountain would have fallen far short of the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville on the snowy-my father says blizzardy-morning that I was born. I like to say that I was born in the shadow of Monticello. ![]()
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