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A gorgeous, moving memoir of how one of America's most innovative and respected journalists found his voice by coming to terms with a painful pastNew York Times columnist Charles M. Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where he grew up--a place where slavery's legacy felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant wash of violence.Blow's attachment to his mother--a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, a job plucking poultry at a nearby factory, a soon-to-be-ex husband, and a love of newspapers and learning--cannot protect him from secret abuse at the hands of an older cousin. It's damage that triggers years of anger and searing self-questioning.