Morris

"As a boy Richard Wright lived on a tenant farm not far from the town. Once, many years later, when I was full grown and twenty-two, I found myself in Paris; I got Wright's phone number and called him, saying I was a white Yazoo boy. "You're from Yazoo?" he asked. "Well, come on over." We went out to an Arab bar and got a little drunk together, and talked about the place we both had known. I asked him, "Will you ever come back to America?" "No," he said. "I want my children to grow up as human beings." After a time a silence fell between us, like an immense pain-- or maybe it was my imagining."


December 18, 2000