Professor Chambers queried me about the moving picture “Django Unchained,” it being said I had firsthand times ten the experience in this affair so chronicled, even to the point of taking up arms with Reverend Brown and dying so famously. My reply was thus:

“It was as the fables on the white man’s prim stage were, or the lurid stories around our cookfires— whimsy and adventure, profound and profane. I took neither umbrage or offense. As for what was real, we must bear witness to these simple truths of America at that setting. The West, whither settled at the red man’s elimination, or wild, was dirty and primitive. The East was dirty and modern. And slavery was much more terrifying than Maestro Tarantino’s vision, for it was banal in its evil, and steeped not in savage desire and appetites, but in the hypocrisy of America’s own stage play’s setting—that of freedom, of public policy, of private rights.”

—D.N.