I’m a Black American woman who was formed in the twentieth century, amid the cold war and racial segregation that was entrenched even in the Bay Area. But how I think, the way I write, and where my imagination has taken me owe everything to places outside the United States. I call them my “elsewheres.” Beginning with France, where I studied as an undergraduate in the 1960s, my elsewheres have hoisted me over the conceptual boundaries that America imposed. In Houston in 2018, the metaphor of the barrier became literal when I saw the chain-link fence around the Houston Negro Hospital, where I was born at 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning in August 1942. Nell Irvin Painter Riverside General Hospital, opened in 1927 as the Houston Negro Hospital, Houston, Texas, 2018 Visiting the city while on book tour, I saw, for the first time since my infancy, the large white structure in Houston’s Third Ward. The hospital was now empty, but its enduring solidity showed how it had protected infants and mothers from the …