Richard Wright’s Civil War Cipher

Grandpa “darkly boasted of having killed ‘mo’n mah fair share of them damn rebels’ while en route to enlist in the Union Army,” Richard Wright recalled.  “Granny’s conversations…[about]Grandpa’s life,” gave the novelist further details of the difficulties his maternal ancestor Richard Wilson endured during the Civil War. “Militantly resentful of slavery,” Wright penned in 1923, […]