I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.
I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.
If I ain’t nothing but trouble, you ain’t nothing but Nothing.
My master jecked up my dress and gived my mistress the whip and told her to teach me a lesson. Every time she hit me she asked me what I said my name was. I said Jane Brown. She hit me again: what I said my name was. I said Jane Brown.
We’ve only been living in these ghettos for seventy-five years or so, but the other three hundred years – I think this is worth writing about. I think we’ve made tremendous sacrifices, we’ve shown tremendous strength. In the ghetto you see a lot of frustration; you see very little strength.
I don’t care what a man is. I mean, a great artist is like a great doctor. I don’t care how racist he is. If he can show me how to operate on a heart so that I can cure a brother, or cure someone else, I don’t give a damn what the man thinks; he has taught me something. And that is valuable to me. And that is valuable to others and man as a whole.
That’s man’s way. To prove something. Day in, day out he must prove he is a man. Poor Fool.
We ain’t giving up,” I said. “We done gone this far.
I didn’t want to show it. Because if what he was saying was true, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Marshall was too big. If it was just Bonbon who wanted to hurt Marcus, you might be able to prevent that. Bonbon was nothing but a poor white man, and sometimes you could go to the rich white man for help. But where did you go when it was the rich white man? You couldn’t even go to the law, because he was the law. He was police, he was judge, he was jury.