One might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality
My father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit, Ridgeway said. All these years late, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build an...
Its terms? Homer watched her as she dressed, like a valet who had waited on her since the cradle. I’m caught, Cora said. You choose to be with him. Homer looked puzzled. He took out his notebook, turn...
You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel
Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only...
When you talk about this trip, and you will, because it was quite a journey and you witnessed many things, there were ups and downs, sudden reversals of fortune and last-minute escapes, it was really...
When the work was done, and the day's punishments, the night waited as an arena for their true loneliness and despair.
There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.
There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers.
The white man in the book, Gulliver, roved from peril to peril, each new island a new predicament to solve before he could return home. That was the man’s real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civi...
The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels,
Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation.
Settlers needed the land, and if the Indians hadn’t learned by then that the white man’s treaties were entirely worthless, Ridgeway said, they deserved what they got.
Rap was a natural resource, might as well pay for sunlight or the very breeze or an early-morning car alarm going off. No, I spent my money on music for moping. Perfect for drifting off on the divan w...
Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed,
Know your value and you know your place in the order.
Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.
Judge not the dysfunctions of others, let ye be judged.
Isn't it great when you're a kid and the world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it...Once we knew th...
In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.