The joy of reading and writing : Superman and me / Graduation / Men, women, sex, and Darwin / How to tame a wild tongue / On compassion / Notes of a native son / Lost in the kitchen / Never just pictures / How you became you / Why don't we complain? / The insufficiency of honesty / The myth of the Latin woman : I just met a girl named Maria / A clack of tiny sparks : remembrances of a gay boyhood / On keeping a notebook / Death of a moth / Learning to read and write / Serving in Florida / On dumpster diving / The ways we lie / Women's brains / What's wrong with animal rights? / Salvation / How it feels to be colored me / The declaration of independence / Letter from a Birmingham jail / No name woman / Notes of a native speaker / On being a cripple / Learning to read / The way to Rainy Mountain / Two ways to belong in America / Shooting an elephant / Crito / Aria : memoir of a bilingual childhood / "I just wanna be average" / Clashing civilizations? / The inheritance of tools / Me talk pretty one day / Animal liberation / Declaration of sentiments and resolutions / Just walk on by : black men and public space / A modest proposal / Mother tongue / Where I lived and what I lived for / Ain't I a woman? / Shooting dad / Beauty : when the other dancer is the self / Once more to the lake / Television : the plug-in drug / The death of the moth