I just finished reading Will Thomas’ Dance of Death, set in Victorian England, which heavily featured a character named Hercules. I looked up the name, and it turned out that he was real person! Hercules was one of the “Abyssinian” guards. I just learned about this last week, and that was a real surprise!

Also, there has been a small exodus, of African Americans, moving to Russia, in the fifties and sixties. I’m not particularly interested in Russian history. What I have learned, I learned from researching fictional stories, and the occasional Russian immigrant, but it’s fascinating to see Black lives sprinkled into these seemingly out of the way places.