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 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 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...
You need to be strong to survive the labor and to make us greater. We fatten hogs, not because it pleases us but because we need hogs to survive. But we can’t have you too clever. We can’t have you so...
You have to stand up real close to the posters to see the swirls, and even then they’re easy to miss: Lila Mae had to have Jimmy point them out to her. Horns, boiling cysts, the occasional cussword in...
You can argue for hours about the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but the dark wins every time so fuck the Beatles, just fuck 'em, perspective-wise.
What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as yo...
We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It was the last time you were going to have Lake Tung Ting shrimp in that kinda shady Chinese restaura...
Was it counterintuitive to apply lessons from a women's self-defense book to the World Series of Poker? Yes. But if modernity has taught us anything, it's that you don't fuck with Oprah.
To preempt rejection she dresses to exaggerate her difference when the true enemy is not the world's disdain but its indifference. He is surely the next item in a dreary procession and cannot be seen...
They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popu...
The way poor Michael reciting the Declaration of Independence was an echo of something that existed elsewhere. Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn’t sure the document de...
That is how the European tribes operate, she said, If they can't control it, they destroy it.
Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.
Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.
She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can’t control it, they destroy...
Roger Tipple did not have a weak chin so much as a very aggressive neck.
Over time, Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn’t have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apar...
In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo
If you weren’t a little dirty at the end of the day, you weren’t much of a man.