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Ms. Wilkerson, you have done it again! I marvel at your artistry and how the stories you present mirror passages in my life.

Reflections of my widowed mother struggling to keep the seven minors of her eleven children together on the Flautt Plantation in Swan Lake, Mississippi, abound in The Warmth of Other Suns. Determined to give us last three the opportunity to make something of ourselves, Mother migrated to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1954. Some vignettes in a book that I wrote to answer a poignant question my then eight-year-old grandson posed about my life as a slave appear in Caste.

Your analogy of America as an inherited house is brilliant! My rating is a reflection of my squeamish reaction to the descriptions of the horrors of slavery and its aftermaths--not of your gift of the pen.

Ms. Wilkerson thank you for Caste, which assures me that I am not alone in my quest to tell America's true story, giving long-overdue credit to the diverse group of enslaved Africans, including Onesimus, and little-known African Americans who fought respectively on plantations, in their communities, on battlefields, and in courtrooms for the freedoms Americans enjoy today—freedoms that now enable us to champion “liberty and justice for all� in law enforcement, on city councils, on school boards, in boardrooms and in academia.