I know who you are, and I am—weirdly enough—thankful to you for reaching out. Your reasoning shows exactly why I am criticizing Mrs. Larson’s book, and therefore criticizing you, one of the characters she has created. Yes, you killed Clare, and yes, you might even go so far as to think that you “put her… View More

I bet you all wonder how I died. Well, Irene pushed me. I didn’t jump. When John barged into the party shouting, I was standing by the open window. At that moment I saw my whole life with him flatten out and collapse, and a new life, the one I have wanted for so long,… View More

I’ve got no interest in that dang book of yours. I read the review by that Mrs. Rennels in a cab and it confirmed everything I believe about race. Everything I know to be true.  I make an exception for Margery. Maybe it takes more than one drop of white. But she’s being raised as… View More

Perhaps it’s all for the best, what you say you did. Forget about me, but Margery’s better off without her mother bringing scandal and shame down on her. What a hard thing to go through life knowing. She’s looks white and she’s practically white. She doesn’t know, and she never will know. I’ll send her… View More

John is the only character I write who has actually been to the promise land of racial equality: Brazil. But the fact at all that he spent time there and was not changed, his bigotry left unswayed in the slightest, is a glowing emblem of my skepticism for such a place. Surely if it were… View More

How different is the color line from state and national lines? Brian wants so terribly to “fit in” somewhere – to find comfort somewhere exotic. But then he would be doing to a place, then, what others always do to us – fetishize, and entrust with an arbitrary duty of comfort normalcy. Of course Irene… View More

You need to figure out who you are before I can ever know who I am! I’m just forging my identity through the Harlem Renaissance but I don’t know, maybe life wouldn’t be so bad in Brazil. But all I want is to keept what I have. You question your own past but what of… View More

Clare wasn’t right for you… she wasn’t right for this world. She never fit in but at the same time she was accepted and loved by everyone. You shouldn’t have gotten caught up with her. But she should never have been with you, she deserved better. Your child is all you have left. Clare is… View More

Insecurity… How does one begin to understand how intimately I know that feeling? In family, in society, in my writing, there is constantly something that must be proven about myself. Am I the “new negro” stalwart of this renaissance we are living in? Or am I still the fatherless half-white from Chicago? What’s worse is… View More

Dear Irene, I wish you’d told me about Clare back then. When I walked into that party and saw her–and you, all of you–my whole life came crashing down on me. Everything was a lie. Boy, she did push it. If I’d known then what she was I’d have sued for divorce. And no way… View More