Women and animals, you only have to break them in once, he said. They stay broke. All
When he heard autumn leaves skuttling in the wind, he remembered that chuckle.
When black blood was money, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.
What did you get for that, for knowing the day you were born into the white man’s world? It didn’t seem like the thing
They strung up the guilty and, in the interest of prevention, a robust percentage of the innocent.
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,
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 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 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.
Take it out on each other if you cannot take it out on the ones who deserve
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.
Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. After
One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering...
One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.
Och att de sedan, efter allt världen hade lärt dem, inte kände igen bojorna när de fästes vid deras händer och fötter. South Carolinas bojor var av ett nytt slag – nycklarna och tillhållarna präglades...
New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.