A writer of a certain age might be tempted, even encouraged, to regard the detritus of his life—school diplomas, spelling-bee honorable mentions, expired passports, maybe the odd award—as his “papers.” I have treated my own with sullen neglect. Never sure what I have or what is where, when I actually want something I subject my family to melodramas of exasperation and despair.

A recent episode of this sort shamed me into a promise to put my past in order. Having ransacked house and office for whatever might be to the purpose, I dumped it all on the floor and began making piles. Old, bad writing; I would label that “Juvenilia.” Obsolete contracts, military records, photographs of family and friends, of celebrations with other writers.

And letters. Stacks of them. Mostly typed, some even handwritten, these come to a pretty cold stop in the late nineties, with the advent of e-mail. Among the letters on my floor I found a file of correspondence from Raymond Carver, and paper-clipped to that file was an envelope containing Xeroxes of letters I had sent him. His biographer, Carol Sklenicka, had come across them in the Carver archives at Ohio State University while researching her book, and kindly copied them for me. Some writers keep duplicates of their own dispatches; I have never felt that confident of posterity’s interest, and for me the awareness, or possibility, of future readers would have cramped my hand with self-consciousness. And indeed I could sometimes detect in the uncharacteristic, chin-pulling solemnity of some of my correspondents their mindfulness of Readers Yet Unborn.

I didn’t read my old letters when Carol gave them to me. Perhaps I felt some apprehension about what I might find. In any case, I put them aside, thinking I would look at them later, along with Ray’s letters to me. But until this day I never had.

It was a beautiful Saturday, clear and breezy, and I resented being kept inside by this file-clerk drudgery. But in a couple of hours I’d made a lot of piles, and I decided to reward myself by sitting down for a while with the letters. I read a few of Ray’s, the tone so immediately and unmistakably his that I felt almost as if he were reading them to me. Then I put the file aside and began glancing through some of my own. And I was disheartened by what I found there. Clumsy, effortful wit. Vulgarity. A racist joke. Sitting there alone, reading my own words, I felt humiliatingly exposed, if only to myself; naked and ashamed.

But not really surprised. I had played the clown since childhood, making faces behind teacher’s back, cracking wise during sermons and graduation speeches, mocking the constraints of taste and decorum and liberal discourse while needling those of my friends who looked grave at such offenses. They were supposed to understand that this was parody, that I was cartooning crassness and bigotry, riffing on it, and in the process demonstrating my—our—emergence from the swamps of the past.

I was never in doubt of my own good will and elevated consciousness. If I made a sexist joke now and then, it should be understood as nothing more than amiable joshing at feminist earnestness. Didn’t I change my kids’ diapers sometimes? Didn’t I do dishes and vacuum floors? I was in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. My wife would vouch for me; surely she would.

I had plenty of company in this line of banter, mostly but not exclusively male. None of us would admit to a prejudice—why should we? we didn’t have any—and the atmosphere of right-mindedness could become so absolute, so cloying, that one was sometimes compelled to say the unsayable just to break the spell, make some different music. But this was always done with a dusting of irony. After a black family bought a house on Ray’s block, an unredeemed neighbor complained to him that “a certain element” was taking over, and the word “element” immediately entered our lexicon as an irresistibly sublime piece of swamp-think. So, too, the word “Negro,” as if delivered by an out-of-touch white alderman seeking votes from that highly esteemed, if underserved, corner of his ward.

Could I have played with these words if I had been a racist? No—I couldn’t be a racist. Even as a boy I had been shocked by what happened in Little Rock, the spectacle of pompadoured thugs and women in curlers yelling insults and curses at black kids trying to get to school. With my brother, I joined the March on Washington. We were there.

When I joined the Army, at eighteen, I was trained by black drill instructors, marched and pulled K.P. and showered and bunked and jumped out of airplanes with black troops. If it hadn’t been for a black sergeant I served with in Vietnam, I doubt that my sorry ass would’ve gotten shipped home in one piece.

I read Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes and, especially, James Baldwin—“Jimmy” to my brother, Geoffrey, who was his friend when they both lived in Istanbul. I even almost met Baldwin! He was supposed to drop by the apartment in New York where Geoffrey and I were staying, Christmas of 1963. We waited all night, drinking, talking nervously, but he never showed up; one of the great disappointments of my life. It turned out that he’d been stopped by the white doorman.

Yet there was that joke. And a couple of other cracks.

I didn’t like meeting the self I had been when writing these letters—still playing the rake, tiresomely refusing to toe the line and speak the approved words in the approved way. Mostly I didn’t like the sense of exertion I found here, the puppyish falling over myself to amuse and impress another man. The result was coarse and embarrassing. I wanted to think that this wasn’t really me, just some dumb, bumptious persona I’d adopted, which, to some extent, it was.

But I had, after all, chosen this persona rather than another. And I had to wonder why. When we speak with a satiric voice, in mimicry of the unredeemed neighbor, aren’t we having it both ways? Allowing ourselves to express ugly, disreputable feelings and thoughts, under cover of mocking them? I didn’t want to believe that there was anything of me, the real me, in this voice, but, given the facts of my past, looming in piles around me, how could there not be?

Some of those facts: I lived in the South from the age of four through fourth grade, and in all that time I never played with a black child; never saw anything but white faces in my classrooms, in the hallways and playgrounds of my public schools, or in the neighborhoods where I lived; never ate in the same room with black people or—the clichés are true—used the same bathroom or drank from the same water fountain.

I took a public bus to and from school. I was on my way home one afternoon, sitting on one of the inward-facing benches by the door, when a pregnant black woman got on. She had two big bags of groceries, and the bus was so crowded that she couldn’t make her way past the white people standing in the aisles; she was stuck in the front with everyone staring at her, fighting for balance whenever the bus lurched to a stop or made a turn. Mama-raised little gentleman that I was, I gestured to her and was rising to offer my seat when the woman beside me seized my arm and slammed me back down. She fixed me with a hot, furious stare, then turned it on the black woman, who affected not to have noticed any of this. But I burned with embarrassment and felt I’d done something wrong. I was never tempted to repeat the offense.