Magni Formica Laboris

1. "Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I first saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay. There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon. There was the faint, cool kiss of sensuality when dew came on to my cheeks and shins as I ran down the wet green garden paths in the early morning. There was the vague sense of the infinite as I looked down upon the yellow, dreaming waters of the Mississippi River from the verdant bluffs of Natchez. There were the echoes of nostalgia I heard in the crying strings of wild geese winging south against a bleak, autumn sky. There was the tantalizing melancholy in the tingling scent of burning hickory wood. There was the teasing and impossible desire to imitate the pett...

1. "At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience could ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering." (end of Ch. 3) 2. "There are some elusive, profound, recondite things that men find hard to say to other men; but with the Negro it is the little things of life that become hard to say, for these tiny items shape his destiny. A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars." (Ch. 12) 3. "With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of ...