“
I named you Fauna because I loved Robinson Jeffers’ poem about Flora and Fauna. I asked that they keep that name. I wanted only two things, I didn’t think they’d let me have what I wanted, but one was that you be named Fauna, and the other was that you at least have on your birth certificate that your father was Negro. Because in my little world I believed that black people were made of far superior stuff than the whites I knew. All the great men that I knew, all the great girls that I knew were black: Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Josh White,
”
”