I Have No Plans To Slow Down.

My Family And Our Neighbors And Friends Thought Of Africa And Its Africans As Extensions Of The Stereotyped Characters That We Saw In Movies And On Television In Films Such As 'tarzan' And In Programs Such As 'ramar Of The Jungle' And 'sheena, Queen Of The Jungle.'

My Mom, God Rest Her Soul - She Liked Nicknames. In The Womb She Named Me Skip. There Was Another Black Guy In Piedmont, W.va., And His Name Was Skip. They Called Him Big Skip, And I Was Little Skip.

You Can Say I Had A Severe Case Of 'roots' Envy. I Wanted To Be Like Alex Haley, And I Wanted To Be Able To... Do My Family Tree Back To The Slave Ship And Then Reverse The Middle Passage, As I Like To Put It, And Find The Tribe Or Ethnic Group That I Was From In Africa.

Lincoln Would Love The Fact That Obama Is Such A Great Conciliator, Trying To Transcend Ideology.

So, Mexico, Brazil, They Wanted Their National Culture To Be 'blackish' - Really Brown, A Beautiful Brown Blend. And Finally, I Discovered That In Each Of These Societies The People At The Bottom Are The Darkest Skinned With The Most African Features.