When the door of the Lincoln Town Car shut, I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw Sean coming towards me. I did not get up. He came and sit down right beside me, But I was already thinking and remembering and recalling how Daddy and Uncle Lofton would settle themselves before they worked on the rail tracks.
Nineteen seventy-two saw the publication of the autobiographical novel We Can’t Breathe. For several years, aided by several writing grants, Ronald Fair traveled abroad, pursuing a writing life of great ambition. In the early seventies critic Shane Stevens called him “one of the two best black writers in the country.” Yet this promise somehow never came to full fruition.
Frederick Douglass saw the Fourth as a mockery, because he was still a slave, but slave poet George Moses Horton saw Independence Day as one to be celebrated as a victory for all. As indeed it was.