Bricks Without Straw

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 formality, and which had started him upon the train of thought he had pursued. The question he was trying in vain to answer was only the simplest and easiest of the thousand strange queries which freedom had so recently propounded to him and his race."