Every person I knew had a hellish horror of being “called out of his name.” It was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely constructed as insulting because of the centuries of their having been called n-----s, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots and spooks. 

I laughed because, except that she was white, the big movie star looked just like my mother. Except that she lived in a big mansion with a thousand servants, she lived just like my mother. And it was funny to think of the whitefolks’ not knowing that the woman they were adoring could be my mother’s twin, except that she was white and my mother was prettier.
People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all.
My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps. It was a white woman slapping her maid for being forgetful.
It wouldn’t do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world.
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