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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 deviations on Intuitionism, expounded on the gloom of the shaft and how it does not merely echo the gloom inside every living creature, but duplicates it perfectly. Afterwards there were mint juleps for everyone . . .
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Colson Whitehead |
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The ruthless engine of cotton required its fuel of African bodies. Crisscrossing the ocean, ships brought bodies to work the land and to breed more bodies. The
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Colson Whitehead |
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A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.
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Colson Whitehead |
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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 scaffolding of oppression on the cruel foundation laid hundreds of years before.
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Colson Whitehead |
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The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An
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Colson Whitehead |
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said. "It was full moon when we picked, but there was always blood."
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Colson Whitehead |
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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.
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Colson Whitehead |
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dd648e4
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THE Andersons lived in a lovely clapboard house at the corner of Washington and Main, a few blocks past the hubbub of stores and businesses, where the town settled into private residences for the well-to-do. Beyond the wide front porch, where Mr. and Mrs. Anderson liked to sit in the evenings, the man scooping into his silk tobacco pouch and the woman squinting at her needlework, were the parlor, dining room, and kitchen. Bessie spent most ..
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Colson Whitehead |
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Is this the truth of our historic encounter?
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Colson Whitehead |
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There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers.
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Colson Whitehead |
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Sarsaparilla boiled for one of Sybil's tonics, overpowering the aroma of the roasting meat. Cora
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Colson Whitehead |
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5716229
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Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. After
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Colson Whitehead |
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Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo
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Colson Whitehead |
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the full moon, the white beacon that so often agitated the slave with a mind to run.
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Colson Whitehead |
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The worst sort of scoundrels took up the chase. Drunkards, incorrigibles, poor whites who didn't even own shoes delighted in this opportunity to scourge the colored population.
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Colson Whitehead |
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That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it. If
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Colson Whitehead |
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All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together." --"
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Colson Whitehead |
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Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn't be in chains.
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Colson Whitehead |
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Patrol was not difficult work. They stopped any niggers they saw and demanded their passes. They stopped niggers they knew to be free, for their amusement but also to remind the Africans of the forces arrayed against them, whether they were owned by a white man or not.
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police-power
stop-and-frisk
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Colson Whitehead |
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6f02ed0
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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.
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Colson Whitehead |
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South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south.
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Colson Whitehead |
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Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor -if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.
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Colson Whitehead |
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8d516ab
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A firefly blinked into existence, drew half a word in the air. Then gone. A black bug secret in the night. Such a strange little guy. It materialized, visible to human eyes for brief moments, and then it disappeared. But it got its name from its fake time, people time, when in fact most of its business went on when people couldn't see it. Its true life was invisible to us but we called it firefly after its fractions. Knowable and fixed for ..
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Colson Whitehead |
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cauldron
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Colson Whitehead |
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Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.
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Colson Whitehead |
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The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race - which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children? "For"
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Colson Whitehead |
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e6d320b
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Take it out on each other if you cannot take it out on the ones who deserve it.
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Colson Whitehead |
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By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without.
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Colson Whitehead |
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If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.
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Colson Whitehead |
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ff595da
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Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.
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Colson Whitehead |
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I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine
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Colson Whitehead |
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There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track. The
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Colson Whitehead |
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00c48bb
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The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.
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Colson Whitehead |
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Take it out on each other if you cannot take it out on the ones who deserve
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Colson Whitehead |
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one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality
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Colson Whitehead |
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The white men were silent. As if they'd given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief. One
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Colson Whitehead |
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Settlers needed the land, and if the Indians hadn't learned by then that the white man's treaties were entirely worthless, Ridgeway said, they deserved what they got.
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Colson Whitehead |
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65eb451
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When they got to Oklahoma there were still more white people waiting for them, squatting on the land the Indians had been promised in the latest worthless treaty. Slow learners, the bunch.
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Colson Whitehead |
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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 in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room America remained her warden.
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Colson Whitehead |
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6c27847
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Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.
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consititution
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Colson Whitehead |
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1c477d8
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it means what it say," Ethel said. "It means that a Hebrew may not enslave a Hebrew. But the sons of Ham are not of that tribe. The were cursed, with black skin and tails. Where the Scripture condemns slavery, it is not speaking of negro slavery at all."
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slavery
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Colson Whitehead |
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47bfd4e
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Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident.
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Colson Whitehead |
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my father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit," Ridgeway said. "All these years late, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. One destiny by divine perscription--the American imperative."
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Colson Whitehead |
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2c7d955
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That was the man's real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered--he kept forgetting what he had.
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Colson Whitehead |