They rounded up the Indians in camps, the women and children and whatever they could carry on their backs, and marched them west of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears and Death,
Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.
The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race – which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for...
The peculiar institution made Cora into a maker of lists as well. In her inventory of loss, people were not reduced to sums, but multiplied by their kindnesses.
The only currency to satisfy the debt was their survival and to help others when circumstances permitted.
The old woman had destroyed his family so thoroughly it couldn’t have been accidental. It wasn’t her niece’s greed—the old woman had played a trick on them the whole time.
The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.
The lobby of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building was almost finished when she arrived. As if to distract from the minuscule and cramped philosophy of what would transpire on the floors above, the city...
The future? The future was the clay in their hands.
The farm's carpenters were true artisans - they had to be to keep all those book from jumping off the shelves, so many wonders did they contain.
The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost gen...
Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness.
Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futu...
She was sure he had claimed a hundred and one years at his last party. He was only half that, which meant he was the oldest slave anyone on the two Randall plantations had ever met. Once you got that...
She took her hatchet. She took flint and tinder. And like her mother she dug up her yams.
She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion.
Plantation justice was mean and constant but the world was indiscriminate. Out in the world, the wicked escaped comeuppance and the decent stood in their stead at the whipping tree. Tennessee's disast...
It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature.
If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.
Hey, man! Hey, hold up a minute! Like many New Yorkers, he had a crackhead alert system and turned, steeling himself.