Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.

It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.