I came of age in the years after what historian C. Vann Woodward called the Second Reconstruction. I would enjoy its fruits, and there would not be the Nadir that followed the first Reconstruction, but there was a mitigated darkness. I slid in and out of the colored-negro-black world in which I was raised, travelling between the Ivy League and my homeplace, but it was being overtaken by something that was not us.