I Cannot Be Understood In

If I'm Remembered For Having Done A Few Good Things And If My Presence Here Has Sparked Some Good Energies, That's Plenty.

I Knew What It Was To Be Uncomfortable In A Movie Theater Watching Unfolding On The Screen Images Of Myself - Not Me, But Black People - That Were Uncomfortable.

I Want My Great-granddaughter To Have A Fairly Good Understanding Of The World In Which I Lived For 81 Years And Also The World Before I Came Into It - All The Way Back A Hundred Thousand Years, To The Beginning Of Our Species.

I Had Chosen To Use My Work As A Reflection Of My Values.

But Perhaps More Important, As Someone Wishing To Make A Comment Or Two About Contemporary Life And Values, I Don't Have To Dig Through Libraries Or Travel To Exotic Lands To Arrive At A View Of Our Modern Situation Refracted Through The Lens Of The Preindustrial World, Or The Uncommercialized, Unfranchised, Perhaps Unsanitized-and Therefore Supposedly More "authentic"-perspective Ofthe Third World. Very Simply, This Is Because That "other" World, As Alien As If Separated By Centuries In Time, Is The One From Which I Came