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all of my elders and relatives who have passed on over, who are now with the ancestors, who are now, themselves, ancestors, guiding and protecting me, whispering to me so that I, too, might share the testimony.
The first time you arrived you were not in chains. You were greeted warmly and exchanged food, art, and purpose with those who knew that neither people nor land should be owned.
Lies are more affectionate than truth and embrace with both arms.
Tell him I remember every curl on his head and every fold on his body down to the creases between his toes. Tell him not even the whip can remedy that.”
Just take a quick look to know he still ours, even if he belong to somebody else.”
They who use your suffering as a measuring stick for how much they gone build on top of it.
the baths didn’t change the demeanor of the sucked teeth that held The Two of Them in contempt. So they learned to keep mostly to themselves. They were never unfriendly, exactly, but the barn became a kind of safe zone and they stuck close to it.
The horn had sounded to let them know work was ending. A deceitful horn, since work never ended, but merely paused.
He turned to his left and looked toward the cotton field and saw the silhouettes of people carrying sacks of cotton on their backs and on their heads, dropping them off into wagons waiting in the distance.
Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place.
There were only traces of it now, insignificant battles in the far corners of his eyes, maybe a smidgen at the back of his throat. But it was overcome by other things.
All of them chained together at the ankles and at the wrists, which made movement labored and unified. Some of them wore iron helmets that covered
their entire heads, turned their voices into echoes and their breathing into rattles. The oversized contraptions rested on their collarbones, leaving behind gashes that bled down to their navels and made them woozy. Everyone was naked.
Nearly twenty years old now and so much had remained unspoken between them. To leave it in the silence was the only way it could be and not break a
spirit in half.
“I know my mam and my pappy, but all I remember is their crying faces. Someone take me from them and they stand there watching me as the whole sky open up on them. I reach my hand out, but they only get farther and farther away until all I hear is screams and then nothing. My hand still reaching out and grabbing nothing.”
It would be considered theft here, he knew, but to him, it was impossible to steal what was already yours—or should have been.
Ruth insisted that his bedsheets be washed weekly and his bed be turned down every night despite his absence. The last bedroom was for guests.
Halifax plantation by its rightful name: Empty. And there was no escape. Surrounded by dense, teeming wilderness—swamp maple, ironwood, silverbell, and pine as far, high, and tangled as the mind could imagine—and treacherous waters where teeth, patient and eternal, waited beneath to sink themselves into the flesh, it was the perfect place to hoard captive peoples.
had tried to turn her own thinking against her. It had tried to make her gaze upon her reflection and judge what she saw as repulsive. She did none of these things.
confidence. None of this was visible to the naked eye. It was a silent rebellion, but it was the very privacy of it that she enjoyed most. Because there was precious little of that here—privacy, joy, take your pick.
So Ruth cried and Maggie learned right then and there that a toubab woman’s tears were the most potent of potions; they could wear down stone and make people of all colors clumsy, giddy, senseless, soft.
What kind of people won’t even feed their own babies? Deny their offspring the blessing of their very own milk? Even animals knew better.
Giving birth on Empty was a deliberate act of cruelty and she couldn’t forgive herself for accomplishing it on three out of six occasions. And who knew where the first or the second were now. See? Cruelty.
it, not even to herself, but she was broken. Her years on Empty had succeeded in hollowing her like its name promised. From friend to rag doll to cattle to cook, and not a single one with her permission. Wouldn’t that bust anyone up? So yes, she was broken.
People liked pride. Mistook it for purpose.
For they were as frisky and playful as crows and her proximity made her feel as if she were in the dark sky, suspended upon the surface of their wings. Oh so black. Oh so high. Up there, where there was safety and glow.
love that laid itself down over everything so that there could be beauty even in torment, where possibly could Isaiah have gotten the courage to do it and only it, knowing what Paul wished to use Isaiah’s body for?
Given enough time, betrayal—no matter how tiny—makes its way up the steps and sits on the throne as though it had always belonged there.
It wasn’t good to think about the past because thinking about it could conjure it up.
He sat in that dark shack for hours. He saw the darkness turn in upon itself, churn, and spasm. He watched it reach out for him, felt it first caress, then clutch and fondle him.
One hundred pounds, finally, when he could have picked double that. But it was important to manage their expectations. Give them your peak and then the moment you don’t perform at that level, the fools want to split your back open and deny healing.
He removed his straw hat, which Essie had weaved for him herself, held it to his chest, and looked down at his feet. This was the only way ever to approach a toubab, but especially if you intended to ask for something.
The scars lined them the same way bark lined trees. But those weren’t the worst ones. The ones you couldn’t see: those were the ones that streaked the mind, squeezed the spirit, and left you standing outside in the rain, naked as birth, demanding that the drops stop touching you.
depiction of the Halifax cotton field itself, at high noon, when the sun is at its peak and the pickers are under the strictest surveillance, when the throat threatens to collapse and crumble from lack of water, and yet the overseers look at you as though taking a natural human pause is unthinkable, reminding you that it could be worse: you could be chopping cane at an increased risk of severed limb; you could be at the docks with men who hadn’t seen civilization in quite some
time and wouldn’t discriminate one hole from the next; you could be pulling indigo, which meant your work would forever mark your hands as tools. Or you could be the property of doctors who needed cadavers more than they needed anything else. All of that to say: Be thankful that you’re a cotton picker and an occasional bed warmer. It could be worse.
The full passage that is attached to this an amazing description of what it meant to be a field slave.
These trees are no home, not to the sparrow or the blue jay, nor to the ant or caterpillar. These trees, some upright, some gnarled, some felled, all sentinels, tasked with one bit of labor: to witness. And maybe they do, but what use is a witness who would never offer up testimony?
It matters to know who was first because it should be noted who didn’t prevent a second.
But to be in one’s natural state, save the mosquitoes, wasn’t the kind of humiliation toubab imagined it should be. The skin caught every breeze along with every light. Privates were free. And the fog kissed you, left a moisture for your skin to drink, every bit as holy as any baptism,
A FUCKING READ!!!!
“I tell y’all this because it the way we have to begin. Don’t matter if you know it already. A long line of womens before us did this work. Used to be men too, until they forgot who they was. Something about men make them turn they back.
tried to flatten himself, but to no avail because Puah’s wide eyes saw all, even the things he wanted to hide. The soft things that resided under the layers of rock that were once flesh, but he had to make it something harder in order to exist.
She stepped out of the weeds and onto the dusty ground, worn by the trampling of dozens of feet, which created a kind of border between the plantation and the shacks. That was where they felt it, she thought. Separate from their deeds. Parted from the effects of their own havoc, which they refused to admit was their own doing, so it would, in some future time, long after she was dead she was certain, also be their undoing.
She looked out into the dusk. How golden it was, momentarily, before it turned itself inside out to show its lovely bruises, mauve blending into a blush.
Puah got up and then sat down next to Essie. She wondered, too, how she still had breath, how she hadn’t yet been ripped up, with so many toubab around needing nary a reason—and she knew they had plenty. The cow was always useful for something. Milk, if not labor. Labor, if not meat. Meat, if not milk. Rape. But this wasn’t the time to ponder
That could have been the trade: her life for his. And then perhaps she was taken to auction, breasts still filled with baby’s milk made specifically for him, which leaked when she heard the crowd jeer because it sounded so much like an infant crying. No dress to stain, the milk dripped down her ribs, then her thighs before hitting the wood planks of the block to be absorbed by heat and dead trees.
Least of all could he reveal that he, indeed, saw the sun rise and set, and noticed that what each did to the sky differed in ways that entire volumes could be written about and he could write them.
Unwillingness wore a woman in a way that made him want to weep.
Adam hoped that the thick of the woods on either side of them and the kindness of sleeping blooms would be the fence between him and thieves. The alternative was just as dangerous. He might have to kill a toubab, which was another way of saying he would have to die by suicide. There were never any real choices for chained people in this world, but for the strong . . .
They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on people’s throats with all their might and asked why the people
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