In the 1960s, in my home town of Jackson, the civil
rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered one night
in darkness, and I wrote a story that same night about
the murderer (his identity then unknown) called
'Where Is the Voice Coming From?' But all that absorbed
me, though it started as outrage, was the necessity
I felt for entering into the mind and inside the
skin of a character who could hardly have been more
alien or repugnant to me. Trying for my utmost, I
wrote it in the first person. I was wholly vaunting the
prerogative of the short-story writer. It is always
vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside another
person, but it is what a story writer does in
every piece of.....
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