I Want To Be Remembered As Someone

My Father Lived To Be 97 And Played Bridge Every Day Up To The End, So I've Got A 50 Percent Chance Of Living A Long Life Like Him.

My Mom, God Rest Her Soul - She Liked Nicknames. In The Womb She Named Me Skip. There Was Another Black Guy In Piedmont, W.va., And His Name Was Skip. They Called Him Big Skip, And I Was Little Skip.

We Must Begin To Understand The Nature Of Intertextuality . . . The Manner By Which Texts Poems And Novels Respond To Other Texts. After All, All Cats May Be Black At Night, But Not To Other Cats.

What Happened In The Interim Is, Billions Of Records Have Been Digitized. Historians And Scholars Have Always Used Genealogical Records To Tell The Story Of American History. It Takes Months And Years Of Research. I Can't Even Tell You How Laborious That Is. You Have To Be Somebody Who Has A Lot Of Free Time, Like A Professor Who Can Take Tenure Or Someone With A Great Deal Of Leisure.

In A One-hour Documentary, You Can Tell Maybe Ten Stories. That's How The Documentary Is Structured. I Wrote To Forty Of The Greatest Historians Of Both African And African-american History, And Hired Them As Consultants. I Had Them Submit What They Thought Were The Indispensable Stories, The Ones They Felt This Series Absolutely Had To Include.