I went home and read some Shakespeare. Why Shakespeare? Maybe I was looking for solace, or trying to claim for myself some part of the old white world that had just shown itself to be so horrible. I read in "Titus Andronicus" a speech by Aaron the Moor and felt his anger. 

    
  "Few come within the compass of my curse--
  Wherein I did not some notorious ill:
  As kill a man or else devise his death;
  Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it;
  Accuse some innocent and forswear myself;
  Set deadly enmity between two friends;
  Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
  Set fire on barns and haystalks in the night
  And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
  Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves
  And set them upright at their dear friends' door."

I wondered what I could do with this rage. I knew that I had to turn it into something creative. As Hamlet says in the speech to the players, my purpose was to "hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature." This I could do, indeed, this I am doing. And I won't have to spend twenty years in Sing Sing for doing it.