stroke left a dark smudge.
I shouted to Shawn when the purlins were clean. He appeared from
behind an I-beam and raised his welding shield. When he saw me, his
face broke into a wide smile. “Our Nigger’s back!” he said.
—THE SUMMER SHAWN AND I had worked the Shear, there’d been an
afternoon when I’d wiped the sweat from my face so many times that,
by the time we quit for supper, my nose and cheeks had been black.
That was the first time Shawn called me “Nigger.” The word was
suprising but not unfamiliar. I’d heard Dad use it, so in one sense I
knew what it meant. But in another sense, I didn’t understand it as
meaning anything at all. I’d only ever seen one black person, a little
girl, the adoptive daughter of a family at church. Dad obviously hadn’t
meant her.
Shawn had called me Nigger that entire summer: “Nigger, run and
fetch those C-clamps!” or “It’s time for lunch, Nigger!” It had never
given me a moment’s pause.
Then the world had turned upside down: I had entered a university,
where I’d wandered into an auditorium and listened, eyes wide, mind
buzzing, to lectures on American history. The professor was Dr.
Richard Kimball, and he had a resonant, contemplative voice. I knew
about slavery; I’d heard Dad talk about it, and I’d read about it in Dad’s
favorite book on the American founding. I had read that slaves in
colonial times were happier and more free than their masters, because
the masters were burdened with the cost of their care. That had made
sense to me.
The day Dr. Kimball lectured on slavery, he filled the overhead
screen with a charcoal sketch of a slave market. The screen was large;
as in a movie theater it dominated the room. The sketch was chaotic.
Women stood, naked or half naked, and chained, while men circled
them. The projector clacked. The next image was a photograph, black
and white and blurred with age. Faded and overexposed, the image is
iconic. In it a man sits, stripped above the waist, exposing for the
camera a map of raised, crisscrossing scars. The flesh hardly looks like
flesh, from what has been done to it.
I saw many more images in the coming weeks. I’d heard of the Great
Depression years before when I’d played Annie, but the slides of men