Bricks Without Straw

Freedom has brought Nimbus a sealed, official-looking paper—and, by his count, three names. “I don’ know who I be,” he says, trying to choose among identities he never asked for.

Two years after the Civil War’s surrender, Nimbus stands before his log-house in the Southern evening, with his wife listening as he wrestles with a strange new freedom. Once, his enslaver gave him a name; now official papers and changing times have left him unsure which name is truly his—or what freedom requires him to become. With humor sharpened by memory, he weighs the past against a future he can barely make sense of. If a man can be renamed by others, how does he decide who he is?

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