Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population r...
Each thing had a value and as the value changed, everything else changed also. A broken calabash was worth less than one that held its water, a hook that kept its catfish more prized than one that rel...
Each night, with meticulous care, Homer opened his satchel and removed a set of manacles. He locked himself to the driver's seat, put the key in his pocket, and closed his eyes. Ridgeway caught Cora l...
Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage...
Cora hoped the musicians wouldn't think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody wi...
Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believ...
But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.
Before I came back to North Carolina, I’d never seen a mob rip a man limb from limb, Martin said. See that, you stop saying what folks will do and what they won’t. True,
At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.
As the years pass, Valentine observed, racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon, and not in the south.
And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.
And that great mixture was brought to America in the holds of slave ships. To the north, the south. Their sons and daughters picked tobacco, cultivated cotton, worked on the largest estates and smalle...
All men are created equal, unless we decide that you are not a man.
After a lull in white arrests, some towns increased the rewards for turning in collaborators. Folks informed on business rivals, ancient nemeses, and neighbors, recounting old conversations where the...
A society manufactures the heroes it requires.
A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.
The full moon, the white beacon that so often agitated the slave with a mind to run.
The children make of it what they can. What they don’t understand today, they might tomorrow. The Declaration is like a map. You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it yo...
Said. It was full moon when we picked, but there was always blood.
In the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation.