The Changeling

by Victor LaValle

Despite his immediate attraction, Brian had a habit of mispronouncing Lillian Kagwa’s last name, and Lillian kept mistaking Brian for other white men.

LOL

They erased the West from their lives.

Improbabilia.

Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child.

Carlton Lake got Baudelaire’s corrected texts; Apollo Kagwa got a horny postcard from Aleister Crowley.

Maybe the nine-year-old girl, no longer able to read her book in the dark, might also be an accredited doula?

Cellphone footage from that night showed four black kids waving and smiling and looking gleeful, and generally speaking news outlets don’t find that sort of thing worth sharing.

It was as if one bright eye opened in the dark apartment, then shut again.

If our relationships are made of many small lies, they become something larger, a prison of falsehoods.

History isn’t a tale told once, it’s a series of revisions.

Some suggested, one might say gloated, that this kind of thing was incredibly common in black households. They live in hell, these people. So they act like devils.

It was like being inside a Wookiee’s armpit.

Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter.”

a chaos of shrubs and trees.

a force of great destruction arrived.

“We’re like the police,” Cal said. “We don’t track those numbers.”

To her, a life without books wasn’t living.

“Not all of them do. I don’t demand that they stay. These women came to me bereft and confused. I offered them a place where they would be believed. Not second-guessed. Not dismissed. Here they wouldn’t have their realities explained away. Do you know how few women get that simple gift? It works miracles. Not all of them want to stay but every woman leaves this place stronger than when she arrived.”

Broken glass scattered across the ground like glitter,

And I did not survive Iraq to get shot to death by some Suffolk County cop who ‘feared for his life.’ You feel me?”

In America your name must be convenient or it must be changed.”

You leave a trail of breadcrumbs any wolf could follow, then act shocked when the wolf is outside your door.

“My son saw what was left of the Knudsen line. Just me, this house, and all the debt associated with it. But he had a wife and two daughters of his own. A good job, working with computers, but it hardly made him enough. There was a time in this country when a man like him could be sure his children would do better than he had done. Once that was the birthright of every white man in America. But not anymore. Suddenly men like my son were being passed over in the name of things like ‘fairness’ and ‘balance.’ Where’s the justice in that?”

anguish.

The world is full of glamour, especially when it obscures the suffering of the weak.

What lengths will people stretch to believe they’re still good?

A funeral not for his father but his fatherlessness. Let that monster rest.