We all have heard the stories about great works being rejected by publishers. Many of these stories are humorous because they are in the past, and the recipient or the target of those rejections have become celebrated. We laugh – or if we are unkind, we snicker – at the short-sightedness of the so-called expert. [….]
Once, while at a slavery museum in my region, I saw a picture of a horribly abused man, a runaway slave, who’d been whipped so brutally that the skin on his back was pigmented into one massive grayish whelp. The image stuck with me, haunted me, but what reverberates in my memory, was the Churchill [….]
