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Lies are more affectionate than truth and embrace with both arms.
Being forced to do their own work only made toubab doubly vicious, made them feel unsteady and revealed them as . . . regular, which was another way of saying it killed them. Therefore, they wanted everything else to be dead, too.
He put inside me whether I want him there or not. He come out of me raising hell behind him. And I gotta be the one to nurse him. I gotta be the one to bounce him on my knee when he cries too long. While Amos just sit across from me watching that I don’t do nothing of what he call “silly.” But what silly about me having say over what I am?
Typically, people weren’t permitted to step foot in the Big House at all, much less enter where toubab usually entered. Other than Maggie, Essie, and a few others, people knew to respect the boundary represented by the stairs that led to the massive front doors. Because of that border, there was room to imagine what was inside. Some people thought it might be a cave or a canyon. Others thought it might be the end. Amos said, “Naw. Just greed, I reckon.” He was right.
Everywhere a girl existed, there was someone telling her that she was her own fault and leading a ritual to punish her for something she never did.
Puah knew that the secret of strength was in how much truth could be endured.
To survive in this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by toubab, and Samuel’s list of grievances was long: 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
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This is why Isaiah and Samuel didn’t care, why they clung to each other even when it was offensive to the people who had once shown them a kindness: it had to be known. And why would this be offensive? How could they hate the tiny bursts of light that shot through Isaiah’s body every time he saw Samuel? Didn’t everybody want somebody to glow like that? Even if it could only last for never, it had to be known. That way, it could be mourned by somebody, thus remembered—and maybe, someday, repeated.
Victors gave themselves the right to rename murder “triumph”
the easy thing to believe was that toubab were monsters, their crimes exceptional. Harder, however, and even more frightening was the truth: there was no such thing as monsters. Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people and every person had it in them, that fetching, bejeweled thing just beneath the breast that could be removed at will and smashed over another’s head before it was returned to its beating place.
They had already removed her name from all of the monuments and replaced it with the titles of men, thoughtless, violent, cowardly men who were at once afraid of and captivated by the womb that gestated creation—in other words, the cosmos. They had already pulled the goddesses out of the sky and buried them in the deep, hidden away from all but the most gracious.
She thought, What it look like if it were them, for once? If they had been split from their children; if they had to toil for no wages and meager sustenance; if they backs had been mangled for the slightest offense or none at all; if they fingers were stripped to the bone picking and picking and, damn it, picking; if it was they heads that had been placed haphazardly on spikes for a stretch of miles. How it feel if they were under? They might not know soon, but eventually, they would know. And they knew, too. That was why they cradled guns like offspring.
Only one question: What to do when the cavalry arrives? Only one thing to do: With every drop of blood: Rebel!
Like the last thing they—they—said to us: L O V E. That is the living word. But you refused it. Spat on it when it was shown. Gave it the wrong cheek to kiss. No different from the field you became, you are changed. It is difficult to withstand the touch of a people who only bring their hands together to sow suffering who treat the menace that they create like it is not their creation. It is difficult to be among these trees that have been complicit in the destruction of so many people; every leaf, every crack in the bark, every drop of sap, every twisted root: guilty. But don’t they stand
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To the entire African diaspora and all marginalized peoples everywhere: Together we can create a movement. Together we can smash injustice. Love makes us capable of both things.
