“There was the teasing and impossible desire to imitate the petty pride of sparrows wallowing and flouncing in the red dust of country roads.”

Richard Wright, who was born in 1908, describes the “brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay” in his memoir Black Boy. He finds beauty in the “green leaves rustling with a rainlike sound” and in identifying with “the sight … Read More