Bricks Without Straw 12+

📙 Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838 -1905) was an American soldier, radical Republican, lawyer, judge, novelist, and diplomat. Tourgee introduced the metaphor of "color-blind" justice into legal discourse. Tourgée was wounded in the spine at the First Battle of Bull Run, from which he suffered temporary paralysis and a permanent back problem that plagued him for the rest of his life. Financial success came in 1879 with the publication of A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools, a novel based on his experiences of Reconstruction. Bricks Without Straw was the sequel. Bricks without straw is a phrase which refers to a task which must be done without appropriate resources. An excerpt from the beginning of the story reads, "I specs its all 'long o' freedom, though I can't see why a free nigger needs enny mo' name dan the same one hed in ole slave times. Mus' be, though. I mind now dat all de pore white folks hez got some two tree names, but I allus thought dat wuz 'coz dey hedn't nuffin' else ter call dere can. Must be a free feller needs mo' name, somehow. Ef I keep on I reckon I'll git enuff atter a while. H'yer it's gwine on two year only sence de s'rrender, an' I'se got tree ob 'em sartain!" The speaker was a colored man, standing before his log-house in the evening of a day in June. His wife was the only listener to the monologue. He had been examining a paper which was sealed and stamped with official ...