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
Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.
She didn’t agree with the popular arguments for slavery but saw it as a necessary evil given the obvious intellectual deficiencies of the African tribe. To free them from bondage all at once would be...
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.
It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them.
How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured.
He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.
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...
För det är vad man gör när man tar någons barn – stjäl deras framtid.
Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams. In
Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father’s iron facts.
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 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.
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...
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...
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.
Liquid fire was the very blood of the earth. It was his mission to upset, mash, and draw out the metal into the useful things that made society operate: nails, horseshoes, plows, knives, guns. Chains....
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.