Was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.
The Lieutenant’s theory of the barricades. Yes, they were the only vessel strong enough to contain our faith. But then there are the personal barricades, Mark Spitz thought. Since the first person met...
Prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not li...
Memory has a palette and broad brush.
Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.
When they got to Oklahoma there were still more white people waiting for them, squatting on the land the Indians had been promised in the latest worthless treaty. Slow learners, the bunch.
What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don't know because we can't see inside it, it's something we cannot imagi...
Tonight the song you always despised strides from the jukebox full-bodied and you hear the lyrics for the first time, understand the lyrics for the first time after all these years. This new you with...
They'd never seen the likes of this, but they'd leave their mark on this new land, as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable racial logic. If niggers were supp...
They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. A...
There are big forces that want to keep the Negro down, like Jim Crow, and there are small forces that want to keep you down, like other people, and in the face of all those things, the big ones and th...
The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.
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 wished for o...
The white men were silent. As if they’d given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief. One
The park sustained them, the green harbor they preserved as the town extended itself outward, block by block and house by house. Cora thought of her garden back on Randall, the plot she cherished. Now...
The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.
The idea was like a hunk of wood, Caesar thought, requiring human craft and ingenuity to reveal the new shape within.
The cotton gin meant bigger cotton yields and the iron tools to harvest it, iron horseshoes for the horses tugging the wagons with iron rims and parts that took it to market. More slaves and the iron...
The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.
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