First appeared in the Boston Globe.
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR., the head of Harvard's
African-American studies department, was hobbling around on crutches in the
aftermath of leg surgery when he invited me into his Cambridge house last week.
I was there to discuss "The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin," the new
scholarly edition that he and Johns Hopkins University's Hollis Robbins
prepared for W.W. Norton.