October 1, 1994. The Mark Twain House's annual fall symposium had brought the pioneering comic Dick Gregory, cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson, columnist Clarence Page, novelist Gloria Naylor, journalist Andrea Ford, folklorist Roger Abrahams, myself, and others to Hartford, Connecticut, for a day of panel discussions followed by dinner and a tour of Twain's house. The symposium had originally been called "'Nigger' and the Power of Language." This title had quickly proved too combustible, and the initial epithet was dropped from all but the most preliminary advance notices about the event. But the word had hovered behind all the day's discussions--whether I was quoting Twain's 1869 antilynching editorial in the Buffalo Express entitled "Only a Nigger," or Dick Gregory, who had titled his autobiography Nigger!, was holding forth on Twain's genius as a satirist.

I had reread Gregory's autobiography on the plane to Hartford, and was struck anew by its brashness and bite, starting with the dedication on the book's first page:

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