Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.
People wore different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn't hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore costumes to deny blame.
Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.
It trains the kid in question to determine when people in the corner of his eye are talking about him and when they are not, a useful skill in later life when sorting out bona-fide persecution from pe...
There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.
The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling i...
The Four Questions? As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future?
THE music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morni...
She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the starts made succulent and ripe after her time below.
Even angels are animals.
Ravages of prejudice and its bully partner, violence.
You go on about reasons, Cora said. Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don’t make them true.
We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.
No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it.
It was the day after Sam's house collapsed, though she couldn't be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation's cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her h...
In here and out there are the same, but in here no one has to act fake anymore.
To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one's humanity.
Know your value and you know your place in the order.
In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal. On