It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.

I heard several black men on a local black radio call-in program complain rather vociferously the Monday following the Miss American pageant. One caller, who writes for the local black newspaper, thought Ms. Williams to be “politically unaware” because she refused to be a spokesperson for her race, and he considered her “ a liability to the black community.” Another caller voiced the opinion that the selection of Williams as Miss America was further proof that white America wished to denigrate black men by promoting black women. It is with a great degree of dire anticipation that I await the response from these quarters once it becomes generally known that Ms. Williams has a white boyfriend. She will no longer be simply “politically unaware” or “an insulting hindrance to the ascendancy of black men”; she will be a traitor, “sleeping with the white boy just like the slave women used to do on the plantation.”

If he had written nothing but poetry he would have been one of the most renowned writers in twentieth-century America. But Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, travel pieces, translations, plays, scripts, song lyrics, and journalism. And he managed this kind of productivity while still maintaining an extremely energetic social life and conducting extensive lecture tours. Hughes almost never refused to read his poetry at any sort of institution, a college, an elementary school, a retirement home, a cocktail party, on a street corner. And he did not let a little matter like someone’s inability to pay his fee stop him from appearing. He was virtually a literary Johnny Appleseed, dropping poems on the public as if, when he awoke every morning, he could comb them out of his hair.

The cat was making friends. The previous day when Emmet returned home, he had found four other cats loitering near his building. He worried what would happen if the cats jumped him when he left the house. The cats understood his language, but what passed among their heads was impenetrable to him. He had observed their movements all summer and listened to their sighs and spits and sounds, but he was no closer to infiltrating any part of it as a sign.

“My whole family is locked up,” Emily said matter-of-factly, as she might say that her family had attended the same university. “I don’t mean there’s millions of us. There’s just three, aside from some cousins I don’t know. My brother is the only one who tried to make a life. He got married. It worked for a few years, but then he got tired. One night he killed his wife, her mother, and their child while they took naps on the living room floor. Then he walked into the street and sat down, hugging his axe.”

The other patients began to stampede, knocking Emmet flat against the carpet. As they scrambled over him, he shielded his head with hands. Some sidestepped his body; some planted their feet directly on his back. The procession seemed interminable, as if one of them had opened a trap door in the back of the ward, inviting every person in the city to enter and file purposefully over his body. He did not turn or look or lift his head as the shoes hammered down upon him, for fear someone would kick his face. He cowered there until the last foot made its way past his head.