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They who use your suffering as a measuring stick for how much they gone build on top of it.
Crowded, he thought, and wondered if, perhaps, the abundance was too much; if the weight of holding on was too heavy, and the night, being as tired as it was, might one day let go, and all the stars would come tumbling down, leaving only the darkness to stretch across everything.
Who, after all, was foolish enough to show wounds to folks who wanted to stick their mouth-sucked fingers into them?
She could keep passing her misery back onto its source. Maybe that could be a mending. Essie, who helped Maggie in the house sometimes, would be up by now.
shadows falling down her back
Beautiful imagery
Be Auntie knew it was futile by the confusion on Amos’s face. She knew men, ones in heat or ones who had something to prove, were senseless. They would rearrange land and sea to get them both to lead to satisfaction when one was enough already. Afterward, when their minds returned to them, the kind ones experienced regret, the cruel ones sought more cruelty, and the two were indistinguishable to her.
They called on gods that held the waters together to unbind them and let them drown everything that crawled uninvited onto these lands.
Women, most women, did it differently. Privacy allowed them the power to be cruel but regarded as kind, to be strong and be thought delicate.
These were the roads, hot from the Mississippi sun, but not dry because the air was too thick, where even horses walked more freely than the people, insects hovering in the sovereignty they took wholly for granted, and the outer woods, the rivers rushing forward to who knows where, the arc of skies, low but forever out of reach.
But it had long stopped serving the purpose of lessening burdens.
She stumbled a bit, which caused all the women to instantly reach out for her.
He held it up inside that massive chest of his, which was probably its own underground pond by now.
Pride is what leads people onto ships, across seas, into forbidden lands. It is what allows them to desecrate forbidden bodies and stamp them with the names of reckless gods. Pride is at once haunted and unbothered by the disgrace it has built from turning people into nothing.
B’Dula spoke out of turn. “We should kill them all.” The king shot a damning glance his way as the others shifted uncomfortably on their behinds. “You never fail to insult the ancestors, B’Dula. Nor yourself.” King Akusa rubbed her hands together and took a breath. “I called this meeting and you did not even think to give me the respect of speaking first. Surely, your saltiness from so long ago does not still cloud your reason. You could not possibly have forgotten your lessons so completely. Kill a visitor and bring down the ancestors’ wrath. Kill a neighbor and start an unnecessary war. This
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These colorless people had the strangest system of grouping things together by what they did not understand rather than by what they did. He could see bodies, but it was clear that he could not see spirits. It was humorous to observe someone who did not know the terrain but refused to admit it, stumbling around, bumping into trees, then asking who put them in their path so suddenly.
armed with weapons that pulled the very thunder out of the sky.
It had never dawned on Isaiah how things so close together could be so far apart. The barn was just yonder, a good stone’s throw from the Big House, and yet, when walked by legs, the distance between them felt like a journey. The house seemed to be at the bottom of some enormous mountain, or down, maybe, in some deep valley where the thinnest of rivers hid from the sky and wolves roamed.
His heart punched his chest from the inside.
Beautiful
There, then, he remembered Isaiah’s father’s face: all twisted up in the way it does when the soul is trying to leave the body. The difference between grief and sorrow lay there, a cavern in the face that threatened heartbreak for all witnesses, or, in Amos’s new language, the threat of being turned to living salt, to be like an upright but unmoving sea.
Shame was a sturdy master with strong legs and clinging embrace.
Maggie grabbed her chest. He was gon’ walk in through the front door! He had the gumption (he called it “the blood”) to walk right in through the front like a toubab. This simply confirmed what Maggie’s spirit had told her all along. Peace was tricky. There was a matter of sacrifice involved, but rarely did the peacemaker sacrifice themselves as much as they were willing to sacrifice some other, lead them up to the stake to get burned, comforting them as they were about to be lit up so that everything on earth and in the heavens could see, telling them, Don’t worry; glory’s next.
Gaudy displays of ignorance, no respect for the age of the items, how they had been passed down for hundreds of years from mother to son, father to daughter, each holding a piece of those who held them, blue, red, gentle, strong, shimmering once, but now stripped of their luster, debased in the grimy hands of thieves, victorious criminals who had crafted great vessels, traveled from the distant universe, but didn’t have the good sense to wash their hands before they ate. Shameless.
These revived dead had captured them as a food source, would replenish themselves and regain their spirit, vigor, and perhaps their color, by ingesting them. Maybe they wouldn’t even give them the honor of killing them first but would eat them alive as they watched themselves being consumed.
So into the hole they pushed everything, sometimes even their own children, anticipating the sound that would indicate that a bottom had been achieved and they could rejoice in the fact that the dark did indeed have its limits, too. But that sound never came. What came instead was the whistling of things still falling, forever, without end.
The Kosongo people had been one of the few to maintain the original order, and it vexed some of the other kings that a woman should call herself such.
His father knew better and tried to tell him, but he had left out the whole and thus the ends of Kosii’s small circle couldn’t touch.
His parents were comfortable; they had provided him a decent life and he couldn’t remember a single hungry day. But they were never this, not even with full access to the law of the land—and beyond the
he would be aglow with the possibility he was shown, not the residual embers of an unkind torch.
He felt a stirring in his stomach that was likely to push right through his spine and leave a hole there that his soul could use to crawl out of the body. To go somewhere, to do something that was worthy of him being here. Not the basic drudgery that only unimaginative people with the lowest of minds could conjure up.
Adam liked to make room for the possibilities.
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 . . .
How dare nature continue on as though his suffering didn’t even make a dent, like the bloodshed and the bodies laid were ordinary, to be reduced to fertilizer by insects and sucked up by crops.
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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Samuel looked in the mirror that stood in a corner of Timothy’s room. Isaiah once told him that he might find his mother’s face in his own. So when he would go to the river, he would look at his reflection to see. There was his face, only slightly distorted on the water’s skin. When
Never ask a man his thoughts before he has had an opportunity to come. He’s liable to say whatever is expedient, whatever shall remove obstacles to his orgasm. Speak to him after, when he has been released from the throes, after the spasms have subsided, and his breathing has returned to normal. Wait until he has rested and wishes to scour the previous act from his body and mind. Ask him then, when calm has crept back into his lungs, for that’s when it’s most likely that the truth will prevail. Samuel, however, refused to shoulder such risk. The heat rose up in his back and spread like wings.
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They might not know soon, but eventually, they would know. And they knew, too. That was why they cradled guns like offspring.
No one would remember her name, but she had become a larger spirit now: head bigger, hips wider, and whatever the hurt. All
