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It might have sounded peculiar, but it was in seemingly mundane moments like those—when she told a white man something so basic about herself that made his eyes boggle out of his head—that she felt closest to all Black people who were Black long before she was: all the enslaved Black men and women who impressed white people with their reading abilities; all of the Black men and women who became doctors and lawyers and other things people said they couldn't. Garrett Morgan, Marian Anderson, Diahann Carroll. Barack Obama. Her parents. Anyone who had impressed a white person simply by existing. Which, given the number of times Black people had been lynched and raped and beaten down over the last four hundred years, should have been every Black person.
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