This is not our fight,′ the old man said. ‘British or American, that is not the choice. You must choose your own side, find your road through the valley of darkness that will lead you to the river Jordan.
It doesn’t matter where I go, I don’t want to be there. And then I get to the next place, and I don’t want to be there either.
Trying to figure out what you want to do, who you want to be, is messy as hell; the best anyone can hope for is to figure out the next step.
What if a king made bad laws; laws so unnatural that a country broke them by declaring its freedom?” He threw his arms in the air. “Now you are spouting nonsense. Two slaves running away from their rightful master is not the same as America wanting to be free of England. Not the same at all.” “How is it then that the British offer freedom to escaped slaves, but the Patriots don’t?
Keep home in your heart, where no one can steal it.
When one suffers, all are weakened, but when everyone thrives, we dance.
Did he rape my head, too?
The night sky stretched on forever above me, the stars flung like glass beads and pearls on a black velvet cloak.
You look like yourself. Nobody else. Trust me, that’s a good thing.
Life was a battle, and Mother a tired and bitter captain.
Slush is frozen over. People say that winter lasts forever, but it’s because they obsess over the thermometer. North in the mountains, the maple syrup is trickling. Brave geese punch through the thin ice left on the lake. Underground, pale seeds roll over in their sleep. Starting to get restless. Starting to dream green.
That feeling in your stomach when you hear him whispering off-key, down the hall. That way your heart trips and then hammers against your ribs when he sees you and he grins like a little kid at the top of a steep, shiny-hot slide. Call it hormones, an early-stage bacterial zombie infection, or a very pleasant dream I was experiencing; I didn’t care. I liked That.
When I was a real girl, my mother fed me her glass dreams one spoonful at a time. Harvard. Yale. Princeton. Duke. Undergrad. Med school. Internship, residency, God. She’d brush my hair and braid it with long words, weaving the Latin roots and Greek branches into my head so memorizing anatomy would come easy.
It would have eased her mind if I thanked her for wanting to buy me away from Madam. I tried to be grateful but could not. A body does not like being bought and sold like a basket of eggs, even if the person who cracks the shells is kind.
It was hard to know how to play the game when the rules kept changing.
Before the suffragettes came along, women were treated like dogs... They were dolls, with no thoughts, or opinions, or voices of their own. Then the suffragettes marched in, full of loud, in-your-face ideas. They got arrested and thrown in jail, but nothing shut them up. They fought and fought until they earned the rights they should’ve had all along.
Fracture lines etch the surface of the glass box as if a body fell from the sky and landed on it. He doesn’t hear the impact, can’t smell the blood.
But I had never seen a first aid kit for the spirit...
Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.” “When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time”.
Let me ask you something. We’re fighting for freedom, right?” I picked my words carefully. “So why is that man allowed to own Baumfree and Bett?” “Well,” he said slowly, “we’re fighting for our freedom. Not theirs.