Viewed from the vantage point of the cliff, Horseshoe Bend is extremely unusual. But when you’re going through it, it doesn’t appear especially striking. Just another winding twist of the river, of which there are plenty.
To appreciate it fully, you have to experience it both up close, and get some distance from it and look back.
Joyce’s father, now deceased, had also attempted a novel, a Western, back in the day. She thought that Uncle Ralph might enjoy reading it, so she dug into the boxes she’d been hauling across multi states for decades, took it to FedEx/Kinko’s, and had them bind it into a real book for him.
t left me in tears, in a figurative ball on the floor, gasping for breath. And although my understanding of what it meant and means, to be Black in America will never be complete, I feel a lot closer to wrapping my mind around it, after seeing this.
There were some incredibly moving moments in the story, and other parts that made me painfully aware this work was written, back in the day, by two white dudes, who had to throw in some “well, black people are the ones who started slavery” and #NotAllWhitePeople references.
Re: my Fame and Reputation area. I took the much-memed image of a beautiful woman, dressed sexily, legs spread, and banging out words on a typewriter, because isn’t that what I look like, when I write?