That college paper reads less like a time capsule I’m delighted to have unearthed and more like a tomb that was best left buried:
There was a time … when I avoided associating with other blacks, when I tried to emphasize my HALF WHITE/half black status and when I was ashamed to be seen with my daddy.
These feelings about Daddy I don’t recall ever feeling despite all I do recall are memorialized in the fading 12-point ink letters of a dot-matrix printer and he is gone now has been gone for twenty-one years and I am ashamed God I am so ashamed not of him but of myself to have felt shame toward this beautiful man for even one fleeting second.
These words. Like quicksand. A trap. Like a truth that swallows itself.