Attica Locke > Quotes

“Darren knew the power of home, knew what it meant to stand on the land where your forefathers had forged your future out of dirt, knew the power of what could be loved up by hand, how a harvest could change a fate. He knew what it felt like to stand on the back porch of his family homestead in Camilla and feel the breath of his ancestors in the trees, feel the power of gratitude in every stray breeze.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“Mothering, she learned the hard way, was about loss as well as love.”
― Attica Locke, The Cutting Season

“He had forgotten that the most elemental instinct in human nature is not hate but love, the former inextricably linked to the latter.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“The decor was attractive and strong, but blander than she would have thought his wealth and position afforded him. Caren couldn't see the point of having that much money if all of it led to beige.”
― Attica Locke, The Cutting Season

“The belief that they were special, that they had the stones to endure what others couldn't, was the most quintessentially Texas thing about them. It was an arrogance born of genuine fortitude and a streak of hardheadness six generations deep, a Homeric shield against the petty jealousies and lethal injustices that so occupied white folks' free time, their oppressive and intrusive gaze into every aspect of black life - from what you eat to who you marry to the clothes you wear to the music you play to the way you wear your hair to how you address them on the street. The Mathews family recognized it for what it was: a fevered obsession that didn't really have anything to do with them, a preoccupation that weakened a man looking anywhere but at himself.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“His uncles adhered to those ancient rules of southern living, for they understood how easily a colored man’s general comportment could turn into a matter of life and death. Darren had always wanted to believe that theirs was the last generation to have to live that way, that change might trickle down from the White House. When in fact the opposite had proved to be true. In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“You could run, wouldn’t nobody judge you if you did. But you could also stay and fight. Sunsets on the back porch at the old home place in Camilla, William, hat brim down on the porch railing, used to look out over the family’s land and say to Darren, “The nobility is in the fight, son, in all things.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“For William, the Ranger, the law would save us by protecting us—by prosecuting crimes against us as zealously as it prosecutes crimes against whites. No, Clayton, the defense lawyer, said: the law is a lie black folks need protection from—a set of rules that were written against us from the time ink was first set to parchment.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“When he crossed the line into Shelby County, he removed his badge, tossing the five-point star inside the glove box. It slid against a half-empty pint of Wild Turkey he'd forgotten was in there, clinking softly, a siren call he left unanswered for the moment. He felt naked without his beloved badge but also strangely protected by the anonymity of its absence. Without the star, he would draw no undue attention, make no advertisement of his presence to any rank-and-file Brotherhood in the county, rabid dogs always on the hunt. And no word would get back to Houston, where he was stationed, that he was poking around something, unauthorized by his superiors, something he guessed he did hold an outsize interest in as a cop, as a Texan, and as a man. In fact as long as he wasn't wearing the Rangers star, they couldn't stop him from doing any damn thing. Without the badge, he was just a black man traveling the highway alone.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“It both saddened and infuriated him that he wore a badge that meant nothing to either woman, that justice and despondency were so inextricably intertwined that the former was often not worth the trouble of the latter.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“It was a line in the sand for me, a line past which we just weren’t gon’ go, not on my watch. The badge was to say this land is my land, too, my state, my country, and I’m not gon’ be run off. I can stand my ground, too. My people built this, and we’re not going anywhere. I set my sight on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, among others, and I turned my life over to the Texas Rangers, to this badge,” he said, pointing to the star on his chest.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“for every story about a black mother, sister, or wife crying over a man who was locked up for something he didn’t do, there was a black mother, sister, wife, husband, father, or brother crying over the murder of a loved one for which no one was locked up. For black folks, injustice came from both sides of the law, a double-edged sword of heartache and pain.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“Belle Vie was a cipher, really, a place in whose beauty one might find pleasure or pain, leisure or labor. People saw, in its iced columns, in the magnolias and aged oaks, what they wanted to see, what their own history told them to.”
― Attica Locke, The Cutting Season

“I think the hope has always been that you see what you see, and you take us anyway, for who we are,” the Rev says. “Not that we all go around pretending we’re the same. I don’t see how that helps anybody.” Carlisle”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“Darren had always wanted to believe that theirs was the last generation to have to live that way, that change might trickle down from the White House. When in fact the opposite had proved to be true. In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“The law, she knew, is a narrow little box, and it takes only a single misstep to find yourself on the outside of it.”
― Attica Locke, The Cutting Season

“Her place had been born of an idea that colored folks who couldn’t stop anywhere else in this county, well, they could stop here. Get a good meal, a little bite off a bottle of whiskey, if you could keep quiet about it; get your hair cleaned up before you made it to family up north or to the job you hoped would still be there by the time you got on the other side of Arkansas, ’cause there was no point in going if you didn’t get way the hell past Arkansas. Forty-some-odd years after the death of Jim Crow, not much had changed; Geneva’s was as preserved in time as the yellowing calendars on the cafe’s walls. She was a constant along a highway that was forever carrying people past her.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“This is America,” Jay says. “You can sue anybody over anything.”
― Attica Locke, Pleasantville

“Lorraine had come to honor a woman she didn’t even know, simply because she had walked among them, no matter how invisible. Dell and Pearl and Ennis Mabry had also come. ’Cause that’s just what black folks do. Southerners, too.”
― Attica Locke, The Cutting Season

“Ronnie “Redrum” Malvo was a tatted-up cracker with ties to the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a criminal organization that made money off meth production and the sale of illegal guns—a gang whose only initiation rite was to kill a nigger.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“He’d broken one of his uncles’ cardinal rules: never go to town looking sorry or second-rate or like a man who felt like explaining himself fifteen times a day. Even his uncle Clayton, a onetime defense lawyer and professor of constitutional law, was known to say that for men like us, a pair of baggy pants or a shirttail hanging out was “walking probable cause.” His identical twin and ideological foil, William, a lawman and Ranger himself, was quick to agree.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“And that's the bit that stung, the hurt that cut bone-deep. After years of being lulled into believing that the universe bent toward justice, he saw how little friends and neighbors thought of his life, of his right to this country.
After Obama, it was forgiveness betrayed.”
― Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home

“faith is more important than terra firma, that it has to be, for the material world is full of trials and tribulations, transgressions against body and soul, against our right to any piece of this country,”
― Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home

“Wondered which wounded the soul more, living in a country that had never kept any of its promises or seeing America’s capacity for good catch wind and fly for a while, only to come crashing back down.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“At the Sugar Oaks Plantation, there are lawn jockeys at attention on the clipped lawn in front of the clubhouse. They are not black so much as they are tan—not exactly white, but rather some reassuring shade of brown, the universal color of good service. They are meant as a reminder that somebody, somewhere, is working harder than you.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“They were not willing to cede an entire state to the hatred of a bunch of nut-scratching, tobacco-spitting crackers. Money allowed for that choice, sure it did. But money also demanded something of them, and the Mathewses were willing to give it. They built a colored school in Camilla, offered small-business loans to colored folks when they could, and dedicated their lives to public service, becoming teachers and country doctors and lawyers and agitators when the times called for it.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“Criminality, once it touched black life, was a stain hard to remove.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“There were grade-schoolers in Texas who could recite the Castle Doctrine, the state’s “stand your ground” law, as easily as the pledge of allegiance. Mack’s was a textbook case.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“the grand jurors, local men and women pulled off farms and out of post offices and barbershops, for whom a day at the courthouse counted as genuine excitement—entertainment, even—no matter that a man’s life was at stake. The DA had a storyteller’s instinct for pacing and plot twists, the leisurely parceling out of key information. There was no judge here, only a bailiff, the prosecutor, a court reporter, and the twelve members of the grand jury, who had the solemn task of deciding whether or not to indict Rutherford McMillan for first-degree homicide. Because all grand jury proceedings are private, the honey-colored benches in the gallery were empty. The deck was stacked squarely in the state’s favor. Neither the defendant nor his counsel was allowed to weigh in on the state’s presentation of evidence.”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird

“Wally's and Keith's lives revolved around the black folks they claimed to hate but couldn't leave alone. It was, as his uncle Clayton would say, an obsession that weakened them, that enraged and eventually enslaved them within their own hearts...”
― Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird