William Styron Quote

My mother, alone among all the Negroes at Turner’s Mill, had been laid honorably to rest in the family plot among white folks (scant yards away, indeed, from the unsentimental Benjamin, now spinning in his coffin) with a marble headstone not one inch smaller nor a shade less white than theirs. I am no longer oppressed by the fact (as I was for so many years after I had grown to manhood and was able to reflect long and hard on these matters) that the name on that headstone was not a nigger woman’s forlorn though honest Lou-Ann but the captured, possessed, owned Lou-Ann Turner.

William Styron

My mother, alone among all the Negroes at Turner’s Mill, had been laid honorably to rest in the family plot among white folks (scant yards away, indeed, from the unsentimental Benjamin, now spinning in his coffin) with a marble headstone not one inch smaller nor a shade less white than theirs. I am no longer oppressed by the fact (as I was for so many years after I had grown to manhood and was able to reflect long and hard on these matters) that the name on that headstone was not a nigger woman’s forlorn though honest Lou-Ann but the captured, possessed, owned Lou-Ann Turner.

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