I was puzzled. Was there something happening next door to where I lived that I did not know? I thought I had poked my nose into every bit of conceiva… - Richard Wright

I clearly remember my introduction to the African American heritage. I was in the school sanatorium with a bad attack of the flu when the headmistress came to see me, bringing copies of Wright's Native Son, Black Boy and Trevor Huddleston's Naught For Your Comfort, I could not put any of the books down.

He felt that he had his destiny in his grasp. He was more alive than he could ever remember having been; his mind and attention were pointed focused toward a goal. For the first time in his life he moved consciously between two sharply defined poles: he was moving away from the threatening penalty of death, from the death-like times that brought him that tightness and hotness in his chest; and he was moving toward that sense of fullness he had so often but inadequately felt in magazines and movies.

I'm a rootless man, but I'm neither psychologically distraught nor in any wise particularly perturbed because of it. Personally, I do not hanker after, and seem not to need, as many emotional attachments, sustaining roots, or idealistic allegiances as most people. I declare unabashedly that I like and even cherish the state of abandonment, of aloneness; it does not bother me; indeed, to me it seems the natural, inevitable condition of man, and I welcome it. I can make myself at home almost anywhere on this earth and can, if I've a mind to and when I'm attracted to a landscape or a mood of life, easily sink myself into the most alien and widely differing environments.