Ligon demonstrates methods of pastiche and appropriation as means to document and explore his identitification with an historical figure, Henry "Box" Brown. He uses facsimiles of original wanted posters for runaway slaves, for example, but replaces the original descriptions with prose portraits composed by friends. The "community" for Ligon is African-American, rather than a hometown. "Community" may be the history of an identity group (race, ethnicity, religion).