I can only read this book in short spurts until the pain becomes too great. Read it, I must.

My son's Christmas present for me was this book, The Half Has Never Been Told, which is about how human slavery was, and is still as an artifact of history, responsible for the evolution of American Wealth and its capitalist system.

Each time I read a page or two, which depicts aspects of human slavery in the United States, I'm filled with horror.

I'm slowly and painfully making my way through the first chapter which references Charles Ball's autobiographical 1837 work, Slavery in the United States: a narrative of the life and adventures of Charles Ball, a black man, who lived forty years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a slave,

Because my son bought me the book, I cannot help but to think of what my life would be if I was sold as a commodity away from him when he was five years old, never to see him again.

I can't imagine this; I really can't imagine.

It's going to take me a long time to get through this book, bourgeois trifle that I am, to face and understand the world in which I have lived my life. I'm such a weakling that I cannot take this all in one dose, as Charles Ball and millions like him, were forced to do in unending pain and suffering.

We are not so far away from him and we never will be.