Nell Irvin Painter's ninth book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays, is a collection of previously published work. The essays bear witness to history, art, politics, and black culture. From her unique lens as an artist and Princeton history professor emerita, Painter delivers intellectual think pieces that go beyond the easily digestible kind that become the subject of social media catfights. They reflect decades of scholarship. They are thought-provoking and complex. Reading them individually takes a while, but they are well worth the investment of poring over the pages, sometimes two or three times.

While the stunning introductory essay "Ego Histoire" is mostly autobiographical, a section of it retells a little-known Reconstruction-era murder. A man named Joe Johnson had his house set on fire while he was inside it. To save himself, he jumped out the window into a shallow ...