Booth

by Karen Joy Fowler

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. —Frederick Douglass

We cannot escape history. —Abraham Lincoln

The first is found in the lawless actions of the mob, the second in the inevitable rise someday of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.

No girl knows she’s ugly until someone tells her so and every ugly girl remembers the someone who first told her.

Even in the old familiar places, in places you know and love, in your very home, peril is hidden like a serpent in the leaves.

About Charleston, he writes: “There is a greater suavity of manners than can be found in the Northern States—and were it not for the unnecessary and wicked treatment of the colored people the Carolinians would have few blemishes.”

“Children can snatch happiness from even the darkest times,” Ann said. “That’s God’s gift, that’s how God loves children. You grow up, you can’t do that no more. You don’t have that gift. God’s taken it back.”

The moon is high and shiny as a dime above the trees. Masses of stars have been carelessly tossed about it.

This is a good reminder that no one in the world is a reliable source for their own story.

Whatever native talents he has, Lincoln attributes entirely to his first mother’s bloodline. That he was allowed to make something of them is the work of his second mother. He credits his father with none of it.

Rosalie reads Jane Eyre aloud,

I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.

Maybe, with nothing but love in her heart, his darling mother has eaten Rosalie alive. This seems to be something parents sometimes do.

He can see how unhappy she is and that’s a condition with which he has considerable experience and endless sympathy.

For such as we are made of, such we be. —W. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Nothing will ever be the same, she thinks, which sounds more like a line from a play than something a person says, and yet how true it is.

No stars show, just one bit of bright cloud pulled like a curtain over the moon.

freedom is God-given while the law is man-made. So any law that gives one man the ownership

—Quaeque ipse miserrima vidi et quorum pars magna fui,

With my own eyes, I have seen heartbreaking things and even been a part of them.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

“Have you ever noticed,” Rosalie asks, “that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?”

The house is hushed, only the fire crackling and whispering in the night.

Icicles hang like teeth from the window frames.

The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight;—I mean the harlot Slavery. —Charles Sumner

Change is hard,” says Joe. “But change is life.”

He thinks about Father’s playbills and about time passing and how the things you can keep really only serve to remind you of all that you’ve lost.

Gorgeous tragedy. Art that inspires. Art that feels like art.

The Dred Scott decision is now generally agreed to be the worst Supreme Court ruling in all of American history though not for lack of competition.

She drowns her pillow in storms of tears.

Why does the extraordinary courage of ordinary women go so unsung?

This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt. —Abraham Lincoln, 1862

All that remains is the going on.

The more I read of Lincoln’s warnings concerning the tyrant and the mob, the more I immersed myself in the years that led to the Civil War, the more brightly lit the road from there to here became.

The Lost Cause may be temporarily mislaid, but it has never been lost. Whenever Black people exercise genuine political power in this country, the assassin appears, the mob rises. This is the history of America and there is no escaping it. Abraham Lincoln told us so.

I was in the midst of my final edits when, during the violent insurrection of January 6th, 2021, I saw the flag of the Confederacy carried through the halls of the Capit...

Despite the troubling lack of material, I needed Rosalie to tell the story of the early years, most critically of the children’s deaths that so deformed this family. My Rosalie sections are as accurate as I can make them in terms of things that happened, but the character is largely invented.

Terry Alford, author of Fortune’s Fool, a magnificent and meticulous biography of John Wilkes Booth.

Fowler’s last book, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,