Learning History's Discriminating Facts.

I no longer have the letter, so I can't quote verbatim. But I can tell you what it said. The reader -- I remember him as a man -- wanted me to know that he was Jewish. And that he's sick of his fellow Jews going on and on about the Holocaust. He's also fed up with black folks harping about slavery.

Enough, he said. What's the point of dredging up these awful, painful things? It's over now. So what purpose is served? Why should anyone remember?

The reason I no longer have the letter is that I disgustedly deleted it from my e-mail queue. The answers to his questions were, it seemed to me, so self-evident that I felt foolish trying to speak them. Particularly to a Jewish person.

The questions stayed with me, though, and I had about made up my mind to explain a few things to this fellow. But an African boy beat me to it.

Actually, Aly Diabate is one of several African boys quoted in a recent series by reporters Sudarsan Raghavan and Sumana Chatterjee for the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder and its 32 daily newspapers. Aly, born poor in Mali, went to work at age 11 on a cocoa farm, harvesting the beans of the cacao tree, which are used to make chocolate.

He told reporters of 12-hour workdays that began at six in the morning. He told them of struggling to hoist bags of cocoa beans larger than he was and being beaten with bicycle chains and tree branches when he could not. He told them, too, of living on a diet of burned bananas and sleeping on a plank of wood in a 24-by-20-foot room. The boys were locked in every night, he said. Their air came through a hole the size of a baseball. Their bathroom was a can in the corner.

Though a man promising him $150 a year and a new bicycle lured him to the farm, Aly said he was never paid for his labors. And he was forbidden by force to leave them. He was, in a word, a slave.

The fruit of his enslavement is as near as your local candy counter or doughnut shop. The Chocolate Manufacturers Association says beans harvested by slaves mix indistinguishably with those harvested by paid workers in the $13 billion worth of chocolate Americans buy each year.

Aly, by the way, hasn't a clue about the end product of his work. "I don't know what chocolate is," he said.

Here in Fortress America, where chocolate is plentiful and every television gets 500 channels, we have this smug conceit that we live at the end of history. So enlightened have we become, so much progress have we achieved, that we feel free to close the books on yesterday's evils. Those things happened a long time ago, we say. It's inconceivable that they could happen in the bright and shiny now.

But they happen all the time. There is slavery in Africa. There are holocausts in Europe. And, like some fever dream from the 1920s, there are lynchings in America. Matthew Shepard. James Byrd. Gregory Griffith. More.

Because, you see, progress is neither preordained nor necessarily permanent. Enlightenment is a prize that's always in play -- never fully won, always there to be lost. So good people must ever remember, must ever stand guard.

It's disheartening that any of us -- and particularly a Jewish man -- needs to be told this, requires reminding that history is red lights, stop signs and warnings. And that in heeding them, we give purpose to the past and, with luck, safeguard the future.

Why should we remember the man asks? And maybe it's no surprise that he does. He lives beyond history's warning cries, lives in Fortress America, where there's a computer on every desk, a mall on every corner and a million stores selling the sweet candy Aly Diabate has never seen.

That child, by the way, would probably love to put his pain behind him. But so far, it hasn't been easy.

"I can still feel the beatings," he said.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.