Deathless Divide (Dread Nation, #2)

by Justina Ireland

I scowl at her. Funny how the right way for white folks always ends up with someone else taking the blame.

“Betsy was a hero,” I say. “Exactly,” Redfern says, nodding. “Heroes die. But survivors live to tell the story. When the dead got to be too much for us to handle, most of those fools wanted to keep fighting, because that’s what we’d been taught. I was one of the first to cut and run. I knew what the score was. The things you’re taught are only useful if they keep you alive.”

I love my momma, and I surely trust her more than I do any founding fathers I’ve never met. But I have to believe there’s more to life than just surviving.

it makes me wonder: How can we make the world a better place if we are always at odds with one another for every single kind of reason under the sun?

it is so terribly wrong that even in a city with strong walls and its back against the ocean, where people from halfway around the world can live in luxury, there are still people struggling. The stories I had heard of California painted it as some vast promised land, and it is easy to see that there is coin aplenty here. But there is also poverty, and it strikes me once again that it is not simply the undead that make survival a constant battle.

I think about the months I spent back in Summerland, laughing to hide my discomfort, pretending that I shared the same ideas about the world as those fine white families, and the way I felt as though a very important part of me was slowly dying, a brilliant rose robbed of light and sustenance.

This world may hate the Negro, but that is who I am. I do not care about the story my skin tells. I am a colored woman, and I will not let them make me hate myself.