The patrollers were the law: white, crooked, and merciless. Drawn from the lowest and most vicious segment, too witless to even become overseers.
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...
Eccentric being a word, Lila Mae notes dryly, that white people use to describe crazy white people of stature),
Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.
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...
Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.
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...
To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own—such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment.
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 instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum make instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude to the song.
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. Mabel
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 whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An
The ruthless engine of cotton required its fuel of African bodies. Crisscrossing the ocean, ships brought bodies to work the land and to breed more bodies. The
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 first one hundred pages were fueled by early Misfits (Where Eagles Dare [fast version], Horror Business, Hybrid Moments) and Blanck Mass (Dead Format). David Bowie is in every book, and I always p...
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...