Reading with Patrick

Embedded in Kuo’s memoir is a sweeping historical narrative about the Delta—from its hey-day as a bustling, cotton-rich territory during the antebellum period to its downfall after the Second World War. It was a region that once depended on free Black labor, but then discarded after the invention of more sophisticated machinery for harvesting cotton. Worse, in the 1920s and 1930s, Philips County, where Helena is located, held the record for the greatest number of lynchings in the country. Black people became literally disposable and any attempt that a Black person made to improve his or her circumstances or even to assert humanity was quickly met with vigilante vengeance.

Patrick recognized himself within the writings that dealt with this history. Kuo’s introduction of Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass helped Patrick identify the ways in which White supremacy threatened to tear his family apart, just as it had deprived Douglass of his mother, and to see how he, too, had been deprived of a decent education until Kuo entered his life.

While reading Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, particularly “My Dungeon Shook,” Patrick realized that the only salvation, if only for himself, was not to become consumed by hate.