Paint, I realised, had a secret history bound to language and thought, and as I began to read about it, I understood that it was among other things my history, because woven through it was the strange journey of the different colours that are called black. Both black and white have—ho ho—a chequered history, and they were themselves susceptible for centuries to fine divisions of quality and kind. The old northern Europeans had swart and blaek: the wicked and elf-filled matte black, and the fertile luminosity of a darkness that filled the night with shapes and benign magic. Likewise the Romans had ater and niger, and that first word now forgotten is the root of "atrocious," while the other, originally the same happy, effulgent black the Teutons knew, bequeaths us our modern "Negro" and its associated racial slurs, as well as the country of Nigeria.