Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and ano...
Optimism skipped out on the rent a while back, but the cynic in the penthouse won't leave until led out by marshals.
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.
New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.
New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
Money was new and unpredictable and liked to go where it pleased.
Is this the truth of our historic encounter?
Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor - if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American Imperative.
He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.
He is fat and pink. On the United Elevator Co. advertisements, they airbrush away the pocks in his cheeks, the red slivers in his nose. In person he is too flesh, a handful of raw meat. Dogs have been...
He ate every miserable spoonful and ever since it struck him that adults are always trying to buy off children to make them forget their bad actions.
Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.
Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo
Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father’s iron facts.
Cora didn't know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.
Cora adored the old almanacs for containing the entire world.
Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.
But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?
Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for thing...
An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.