Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession.
Charlotte Mason considered herself not only a patron to black writers and artists, but also a guardian of black folklore. She believed it her duty to protect it from those whites who, having “no more interesting things to investigate among themselves,” were grabbing “in every direction material that by right belongs entirely to another race.
All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom.
Papa used to shake his head at this and say, “What’s de use of me taking my fist to a poor weakly thing like a woman? Anyhow, you got to submit yourself to ’em, so there ain’t no use in beating on ’em and then have to go back and beg ’em pardon.
The woman took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away from remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day.
When he paraded his possessions hereafter, they would not consider the two together. They’d look with envy at the things and pity the man that owned them.
The only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.
It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different: it put you in a wonder.
When you hungry it is painful but when de belly too full it painful too.
Miserable, sullen men, black and white under guard had to keep on searching for bodies and digging graves. A huge ditch was dug across the white cemetery and a big ditch was opened across the black graveyard. Plenty.
She had been getting ready for her journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her. But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things.
All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped.
Not every skunk in the world rates a first-class killing. Hanging is too good for some folks. They just need their behinds kicked.
Through this publication, Barracoon extends our knowledge of and understanding about the experiences of Africans prior to their disembarkation into the Americas. Like a relic pulled up from the bottom of the ocean floor, Barracoon speaks to us of survival and persistence. It recalls the disremembered and gives an account for the unaccounted. As an expression of the feelings and attitudes of one who survived the Middle Passage, it is rare in the annals of history.
She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.
Oluale Kossola could never fathom why he was in “de Americky soil.” “Dey bring us ’way from our soil and workee us hard de five year and six months.” And once free, he says, “we ain’ got no country and we ain’ got no lan’.”41 And in postbellum America he was subject to the exploitation of his labor and the vagaries of the law, just as he was in antebellum America. He remained confounded by this cruel treatment for the rest of his life.
There two things everybody had to do: Go to God and find out what living is for yourself.
It’s bad to have some power, but not enough.
The others forgot the work and the weather watching them throw. It was art. A thousand dollars a throw in Madison Square Garden wouldn’t have gotten any more breathless suspense. It would have just been more people holding in.
Things like that gave me the first glimmering of the universal female gospel that all good traits and leanings come from the mother’s side.