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Through him I met other struggling artists, like Joe Delaney, a veteran painter from Knoxville, Tennessee. Often Joe lacked food money, so he'd visit a neighborhood butcher who would give him big bones with small pieces of meat, and a grocer who would hand him some withered vegetables. That's all Joe needed to make his favorite soup.
通過他，我認識了一些正在苦苦奮斗的藝術家，比如喬·德萊尼，繪畫多年，來自田納西的諾克斯維爾。喬經常窮得連食物都買不起，所以他會去附近的一家肉店，那屠夫會給些沾著肉末的大骨頭；他還去雜貨店，店主會給他一些蔫了的蔬菜。用這些，喬就可以做他喜愛的湯了。
Another Village neighbor was a handsome young singer who ran a struggling restaurant. Rumor had it that if a customer ordered steak, the singer would dash to a supermarket across the street to buy one. His name was Harry Belafonte.
村里還有一位鄰居，是個英俊的年輕歌手，開一家生意清淡的餐館。據說，要是顧客點了牛扒，這歌手就會沖到街對面的超市里買一份回來。他的名字叫哈里·貝拉方特。
People like Delaney and Belafonte became role models for me. I learned that you had to make sacrifices and live creatively to keep working at your dreams. That's what living in the Shadowland is all about.
德萊尼和貝拉方特等人成了我的楷模。我懂得了，要追求夢想，就得做出犧牲，有創意地生活。在夢想的陰影里生活就是這樣的。
As I absorbed the lesson, I gradually began to sell my articles. I was writing about what many people were talking about then: civil rights, black Americans and Africa. Soon, like birds flying south, my thoughts were drawn back to my childhood. In the silence of my room, I heard the voices of Grandma, Cousin Georgia, Aunt Plus, Aunt Liz and Aunt Till as they told stories about our family and slavery.
我品味著這個教訓，這時我文章的銷路也慢慢好起來。我寫的是當時街頭巷尾大眾談論的話題：公民權利，美國黑人，非洲。很快，就像南歸的鳥兒一樣，我的思緒回到了童年。在寂靜的房間里，我仿佛可以聽見親人的聲音，祖母、喬治亞表姐、普盧思阿姨、莉茲阿姨、蒂爾阿姨，在向我講述我們的家族歷史和奴隸制度。
These were stories that black Americans had tended to avoid before, and so I mostly kept them to myself. But one day at lunch with editors of Reader's Digest, I told these stories of my grandmother and aunts and cousins. I said that I had a dream to trace my family's history to the first African brought to these shores in chains. I left that lunch with a contract that would help support my research and writing for nine years.
以前，美國黑人對這些故事避而不談，所以我也很少向別人說起。但有一天，我與《讀者文摘》的編輯們共進午餐時，我講了祖母、阿姨和表姐她們的故事。我說，我有一個夢想，就是要追溯我的家族史，找到那戴著伽鎖來到美國海岸的第一個非洲人。午餐結束時，我已經得到一份合同，資助我的調查與寫作，為期九年。
