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Kindle Notes & Highlights
What is our relationship to history? Do we belong to it, or is it ours? Are we in it? Does it run through us, spilling out like water, or blood?
“Oh slavery, slavery,” my Daddy would say. “It ain’t something in a book, Lue. Even the good parts was awful.”
told me one day not to worry, that even the lies are true. In history, even the lies are true.
Jo had begun the slow dance between the streets and the cells that she practiced and practiced and Sammy had begun the young Black boy’s initiation into wine and worse.
We fooled em, Lue, slavery was terrible but we fooled them old people. We come out of it better than they did.”
The generations of white folks are just people but the generations of colored folks are families.
My Daddy wrote me a letter my first week there, and my Daddy could only write his name. But he got this letter together and it said “Dear Lucilleman, I miss you so much but you are there getting what we want you to have be a good girl signed your daddy.” I cried and cried because it was the greatest letter I ever read or read about in my whole life. Mama wrote me too and her letter said, “Your daddy has written you a letter and he worked all day.”
He hurt us all a lot and we hurt him a lot, the way people who love each other do,
Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.
And I could tell you about things we been through, some awful ones, some wonderful, but I know that the things that make us are more than that, our lives are more than the days in them, our lives are our line and we go on.
