an uppity nigger and hanged from a tree.

As a black girl in the South, sent away at three by her parents to Stamps, Arkansas, she had even less right to speak. She was bound to end up laundering or kneading bread for some cut-glass white mistress. She had watched her grandmother, Momma, mocked by white-trash children and saying nothing back, just humming a little through her fear. There seemed no more a black woman could do. Even much later in life, trapped in a run of bad marriages, she could still fall back into silent mode. Whatever a husband wanted, just agree. Lower your eyes, bite your tongue. And especially never expect that any whitefolks would want to hear the story of a black woman.

Yet inside that tall,gawky, gap-toothed body was somebody quite different. In girlhood she dreamed she was a white princess, long blonde hair replacing that tight frizz. As a nightclub dancer in her late teens she was Sheba or Scheherazade, or the daughter of an African chief. She would not speak slang at school, or let people say “nigger” in her own house. Raising her son Guy single-handed, she refused to take welfare. Independence and pride were starched into her. “Sister, change everything you don’t like about your life,” Momma told her. Improbably, she did.

In her silent years, a neighbour called Mrs Flowers encouraged her to recite poetry aloud to the mirror. She fell in love with Shakespeare’s sonnet, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”. Disgraced and lowly, maybe, but