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.
The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map. You trust that it's right but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.
That's how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can’t control it, they destroy it.
Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.
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...
It was nigh impossible to understand Howard's speech under normal circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told her, that half lang...
It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet po...
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. The tunnel, the tracks, the desperate souls who f...
In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry,...
In his mind, the business of existence was about minimizing consequences. The plague had raised the stakes, but he had been in training for this his whole life.
I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.
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.
Att se bojor på en annan människa och vara glad att de inte är ens egna – sådan var den lycka som stod färgade till buds, de som definierades av hur mycket värre det närsomhelst kunde blir.
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...
They were exiles, but Hob provided a type of protection once they settled in. By playing up their strangeness, the way a slave simpered and acted childlike to escape a beating, they evaded the entangl...
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...
Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing