Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.
Our government disdains a risk-reward game that millions of Americans play, Matt wrote, then bails out Wall Street sharks who bet unfathomable sums. I can only conclude that this contradictory stance...
Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord’s will. And maybe he was just a man talking...
I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.
Every Tuesday, James Fulton (and later, Orville Lever) stood in the downstairs drawing room and lectured on the intricacies of his science. Lectured on the implications of European maintenance deviati...
But we have all been branded even if you can’t see it, inside if not without—and the wound from Randall’s cane was the very same thing, marking her as his.
Antislavery literature was illegal in this part of the nation. Abolitionists and sympathizers who came down to Georgia and Florida were run off, flogged and abused by mobs, tarred and feathered. Metho...
And on the plantations, the overseers preserved the names of workers in rows of tight cursive, every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh.
Named Tom Bird, a half-breed who took a sentimental turn
Who are you after you finish something this magnificent—in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on...
The whites got what they deserved. For enslaving her people, for massacring another race, for stealing the very land itself. Let them burn by flame or fever, let the destruction started here rove acre...
The weak link-- she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron tha...
The underground railroad maintained no lines to speak of. The decoys in negro dress, the secret codes in the back pages of newspapers. They openly bragged of their subversion, hustling a slave out the...
The almanac had a strange, soapy smell and made a cracking noise like fire as she turned the pages. She’d never been the first person to open a book.
That's 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.
Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing
Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.
Master said the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun, he told them, was a nigger with a book. That must be a big pile of black powder, then! When
Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from.