Originally published in GQ Magazine in August 1988, my piece “Notes on a Native Son” is re-printed at The Stacks Reader:
The first thing I saw were the eyes. They were large and looked very wise, older than the face in which they were set. There was a sadness about them. but more than that, a power, a strength that survived whatever the blows were—physical or psychic or probably, both—that caused the dark shadows around them, above and below, giving them the bruised look of a fighter who’d been punched. It might, in fact, have been the face of a fighter, a young black man with a thin mustache and short dark hair who had boxed his way out of the ghetto. He had actually done just that, but with words rather than fists.
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