(The essence of the irony of the plight of the Negro in America, to me, is that he is doomed to live in isolation while those who condemn him seek th… - Richard Wright

A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my father sitting with the strange woman and the time when I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands—a quarter of a century during which my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her in amazement. It was on reputedly disreputable Beale Street in Memphis that I had met the warmest, friendliest person I had ever known, that I discovered that all human beings were not mean and driving, were not bigots like the members of my family.

A man who worships in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church lives, psychologically, in a burning and continuous moment that never ends: the present is ever-lasting; the past is telescoped into the now; there is no future and at any moment Christ may come again and then the anxious tension of time will be no more.... [My grandmother] lived with all of us, yet, psychologically, she hovered somewhere off in space.... Always she seemed to be peeping out of Heaven into the world while living in the world.