She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.
Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties.
Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.
Keep on the path and you will not see the ruined people, so do not stray from the path.
It was her grandmother talking that Sunday evening when Caesar approached Cora about the underground railroad, and she said no. Three weeks later she said yes. This time it was her mother talking.
It didn't make no sense until it made the only sense.
Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident.
A plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.
But we have all been branded, even if you can't see it - inside, if not without.
That’s what you do when you take away someone’s babies—steal their future. Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it b...
Ravages of prejudice and its bully partner, violence.
If a bird could be taught limericks, a slave might be taught to remember as well. Merely glancing at the size of the skulls told you that a nigger possessed a bigger brain than a bird.
You should have gone yourself, you ask for a Coke and they come back with orange drink. No one understands the martyrdom of the volunteers for the trip to food concession.
We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.
The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings.
South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south.
She threw him a bone about the movement: 'Lyndon Johnson's carrying on President Kennedy's civil rights bill. And if that good old boy is doing right, you know things is changing. Be a whole different...
Patriots boasted of how often they’d been searched and given a clean bill.
On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light.
It occurred to her one night that she was one of the vengeful monsters they were scared of: She had killed a white boy. She might kill one of them next. And because of that fear, they erected a new sc...