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e734180
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Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.
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Colson Whitehead |
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1153bfa
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That is how the European tribes operate, she said, If they can't control it, they destroy it.
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Colson Whitehead |
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bcde9b5
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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.
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Colson Whitehead |
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6f5b16e
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Then it comes, always--the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.
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Colson Whitehead |
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9736ded
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They'd never seen the likes of this, but they'd leave their mark on this new land, as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable racial logic. If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this world he wouldn't own it now.
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Colson Whitehead |
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a12818c
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Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing
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Colson Whitehead |
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afab853
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favored on her visits. Up close, it was plain
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Colson Whitehead |
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cdeb246
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Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.
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Colson Whitehead |
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303790d
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scattered parkgoers. Cora hunkered and
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Colson Whitehead |
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d31be5e
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In America the quirk was that people were things.
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Colson Whitehead |
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ab413a1
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If you were a thing--a cart or a horse or a slave--your value determined your possibilities.
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Colson Whitehead |
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4ab16ec
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Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. 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. It
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Colson Whitehead |
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06a94e7
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Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.
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Colson Whitehead |
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68beebf
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There was no recourse, were no laws but the ones rewritten every day.
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Colson Whitehead |
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edc2a42
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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-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always--the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude...
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Colson Whitehead |
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c9039d8
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the patrollers were the law: white, crooked, and merciless. Drawn from the lowest and most vicious segment, too witless to even become overseers.
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Colson Whitehead |
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69ecd24
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The patroller required no reason to stop a person apart from color.
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Colson Whitehead |
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db35995
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They strung up the guilty and, in the interest of prevention, a robust percentage of the innocent.
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Colson Whitehead |
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68203e7
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Before I came back to North Carolina, I'd never seen a mob rip a man limb from limb," Martin said. "See that, you stop saying what folks will do and what they won't." True,"
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Colson Whitehead |
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869b3c6
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Patriots boasted of how often they'd been searched and given a clean bill.
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Colson Whitehead |
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21a0124
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The girl's vulgarities reminded Cora of the plantation and the stream of oaths delivered by the hands when master's eye was not on them. The small rebellion of servants everywhere.
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Colson Whitehead |
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73781b8
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Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams. In
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Colson Whitehead |
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2f8390a
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Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money. The shadow of the black hand that will return what has been given.
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Colson Whitehead |
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a5d8457
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Cora had become too accustomed to escaping unscathed from encounters with white authority.
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Colson Whitehead |
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32b32b0
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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 to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass. -- CORA
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Colson Whitehead |
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32151c4
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You need to be strong to survive the labor and to make us greater. We fatten hogs, not because it pleases us but because we need hogs to survive. But we can't have you too clever. We can't have you so fit you outrun us." She"
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Colson Whitehead |
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5383bba
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Money was new and unpredictable and liked to go where it pleased. Some
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Colson Whitehead |
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3dc75aa
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tracking by the good full moon to sanctuary.
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Colson Whitehead |
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83888cf
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She was sure he had claimed a hundred and one years at his last party. He was only half that, which meant he was the oldest slave anyone on the two Randall plantations had ever met. Once you got that old, you might as well be ninety-eight or a hundred and eight. Nothing left for the world to show you but the latest incarnations of cruelty.
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Colson Whitehead |
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4e586bb
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She had not been his and now she was his. Or she had always been his and just now knew it. Cora's attention detached itself. It floated someplace past the burning slave and the great house and the lines that defined the Randall domain. She tried to fill in its details from stories, sifting through the accounts of slaves who had seen it. Each time she caught hold of something - buildings of polished white stone, an ocean so vast that there w..
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Colson Whitehead |
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20b955e
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Looking at them now as folks chased in and out, getting ready, it was hard for Cora to image a time when the fourteen cabins hadn't been there. For all the wear, the complaints from deep in the wood at every step, the cabins had the always-quality of the hills to the west, of the creek that bisected the property. The cabins radiated permanence and in turn summed timeless feelings in those who lived and died in them: envy and spite. If they'..
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Colson Whitehead |
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85a6d75
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White men squabbled before judges over claims to this or that tract hundreds of miles away that had been carved up on a map. Slaves fought with equal fervor over their tiny parcels at their feet.
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Colson Whitehead |
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cba941a
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He possessed a strange facility for the mandatory.
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Colson Whitehead |
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b3b29d5
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Even angels are animals.
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Colson Whitehead |
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b92cf40
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Mark Spitz backed away from the fucking corn.
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Colson Whitehead |
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cb1d8b2
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Cora's mother and Ava grew up on the plantation at the same time. They were treated to the same Randall hospitality, the travesties so routine and familiar that they were a kind of weather, and the ones so imaginative in their monstrousness that the mind refused to accommodate them.
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Colson Whitehead |
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a38a0bd
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Stubborn breaks when it don't bend, and his family had spent too much time with the kindly white folks in the north. Kindly in that they didn't see fit to kill you fast. One thing about the south, it was not patient when it came to killing negroes. In
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Colson Whitehead |
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ae40791
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He hovered on unexceptionality.
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Colson Whitehead |
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d916bfb
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The future? The future was the clay in their hands.
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Colson Whitehead |
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174486d
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A free black walks different than a slave," he said. "White people recognize it immediately, even if they don't know it. Walks different, talks different, carries himself different. It's in the bones."
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Colson Whitehead |
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d890842
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Master said the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun," he told them, "was a nigger with a book. That must be a big pile of black powder, then!" When"
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Colson Whitehead |
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8818de2
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The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be. Cora
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Colson Whitehead |
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73918b9
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When you talk about this trip, and you will, because it was quite a journey and you witnessed many things, there were ups and downs, sudden reversals of fortune and last-minute escapes, it was really something, you will see your friends nod in recognition.
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Colson Whitehead |
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adf154a
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Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.
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Colson Whitehead |