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Habits clamp down on the ankle and resist all entreaties, no matter how logical. As it is in politics, the only victor in the end was ugly compromise.
Because her father taught her that white folks can turn on you at any moment. She fears for her life in O’Connor’s because she believes that the unexpected scrape of a chair across the floor or a voice’s sudden intensity contains the potentiality of a fight.
They can turn rabid at any second; this is the true result of gathering integration: the replacement of sure violence with deferred sure violence. Her position is precarious in the office, she understands that, and in O’Connor’s as well; she’s a lost tourist among heavy vowels, the crude maps of ancestral homelands, and the family crests of near-exterminated clans.
Why hold truck with the uppity and newfangled when Empiricism has always been the steering light of reason?
complexions quick to blood.
Children are doomed to reiterate the mistakes in their parents’ physiognomies, as if trapped by curses that mark generations and wait for unknowable acts of atonement.
Perspective is the foot-soldier of relativity.
We conform to objects, we capitulate to them.
She doesn’t feel as if she lives here anymore.
The Institute’s campus had formerly been a health spa for rich neurasthenic women from the Northeast’s larger cities, which is why the students were never too far from statues of Grecian nymphs, nub-nosed spirits whose long manes eased liquidly into their sagging tunics.
The light congeals in globs on the leaves of the old trees in the courtyard.
“Yes. The Four Questions?” “As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future?”
The House walls vibrate with the sibilants of campaign rhetoric.
a renegotiation of our relationship to objects. To start at the beginning.”
“If we have decided that elevator studies—nuts and bolts Empiricism—imagined elevators from a human, and therefore inherently alien point of view, wouldn’t the next logical step, after we’ve adopted the Intuitionist perspective, be to build an elevator the right way? With what we’ve learned?”
mendacities
A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.
The children masticate rock candy in greasy teeth and wait for their saliva to thicken into sugar. In the heat everything is sticky.
falls away—the heat is even taking its toll on the organ, one man remarks. No, the organ has ceased because the man with the lungs of a bear, the Vice President of the United States, is about to address the assembled: “Our exhibition cannot fail to soften, if not eradicate altogether, the prejudices and animosities which have so long retarded the happiness of nations. We are living in a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind. The distances which separated the different nations are
...more
one rough stone among all the gathered jewels of the world.
Lila Mae does not expect human beings to conduct themselves in any other way but how they truly are. Which is weak.
reliquary
Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.
To believe in silence. As we did when we lived in bubbles. Sentient insofar as we knew it was warm: Silence provided that warmth. The womb.
accreted
No caramel soda, no prune juice, and definitely no coffee: Pompey won’t drink anything darker than his skin, for fear of becoming darker than he already is. As if his skin were a stain that could worsen, steep and saturate into Hell’s Black. They sent Pompey to sabotage the elevator stack in the Fanny Briggs building, Lila Mae is sure of that. It would have appeased their skewed sense of harmony to pit their two coloreds against each other. Dogs in a fighting pit. Pompey would have jumped at the chance, white foamy saliva smeared across his cheeks.
sobriquet
imperturbable
dealership. They had never heard screaming such as this before. Pure. Lucent. Without corruption. As if he were a prophet, and the language of his prophecy shrieks and yelps that those he was meant to save could not understand, but only surmise that his message was important and make their own personal preparations for the Reckoning.
True faith is too serious to have room for the distraction of passion.
volubility
the broken windows so secure in their shattering that they no longer remember glass.
palaver.
She thinks, these white men see her as a threat but refuse to make her a threat, cunning, duplicitous. They see her as a mule, ferrying information back and forth, not clever or curious enough to explore the contents. Brute. Black.
He challenges the machine to a duel now, no more hiding: the better man wins reality.
Aspirants to luxury often opt for red and gold, hues long-soaked into their mentalities as the spectra of royalty.
and it all meant something differently now. Fulton’s nigresence whispered from the binding of the House’s signed first editions, tinting the disciples’ words, reconnoting them.
The grease in Freeport’s hair snatched the lights from the Chesterfield Hotel and glistened like a frog’s back.
crenellated
White people’s reality is built on what things appear to be—that’s the business of Empiricism.
There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie. He secretes his venom into the pages of a book. He knows the other world he describes does not exist. There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.
At least you were predictable that way,” he says, grinning. “Let one colored in and you’re integrated. Let two in, you got a race war as they try to kiss up to whitey.”
