Answer:
Explanation:
Lester describes the way he survived those years as follows:
I grew up in a violent world. Segregation was a deathly spiritual violence, not only in its many restrictions on where we could live, eat, go to school, and go after dark. There was also the constant threat of physical death if you looked at a white man in what he considered the wrong way or if he didn’t like your attitude. There was also the physical violence of my community . . . What I have realized is that on those nights I lay in bed reading westerns and detective novels, I was attempting to neutralize and withstand the violence that was so much a part of my dailiness. In westerns and mysteries I found a kind of mirror in which one element of my world—violence—was isolated and made less harmful to me.
Not surprisingly, Lester found his voice in a book. He explains:
One of the pivotal experiences of my life came when I was eighteen. I wandered into a bookstore in downtown Nashville one frosted, gray day in late autumn aware that I was looking for something: I was looking for myself, and I generally find myself while wandering through a bookstore, looking at books until I find the one that is calling me. On this particular day I wandered for quite a while until I picked up a paperback with the word Haiku on the cover. What is that? I wondered. I opened the book and read,
On a withered branch
a crow has settled —
autumn nightfall.
I trembled and turned the pages hastily until my eyes stopped on these words:
A giant firefly;
that way, this way, that way, this —
and it passes by.
