The Monsters We Defy

by Leslye Penelope

We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.

“Can’t let folks like that get to you none, the ones always trying to tear you down. Nothing gets built up that way.”

Some folks is just born unlucky. You can blame it on the stars, or on a curse, or a mojo hand, but that’s just the facts. Luck is real and some ain’t got it.

Desperate people make mistakes. They’re easy to control because they’re only focused on what they want or need.

everyone dealt with things in their own way.

The thing that was coming would play itself out, the way these things always did. Knowing something was going to happen and being able to stop it were two different things.

“Too many folks wanting work to wait.

“Make sense to work together?” “They’re strangers.” She shrugged. Zelda rested her chin on her fist. “Everyone’s a stranger at first.”

There was something worse than failure—hopelessness. She didn’t want to believe that the hope burgeoning deep in her breast would be for naught.

“What’s wrong with getting out of hand?” Zelda asked, a disturbing gleam in her eye. “In hand is a mighty boring place to be.”

“If it ain’t hard it ain’t worth it,

“The Emancipation Proclamation freed our bodies, the end of the Civil War liberated us from bondage, but it is up to us to free our minds. Part of that freedom includes finally participating in the ideals of this country, ensuring they apply to us: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Are you pursuing happiness, Clara?”

Life was about surviving, putting one foot in front of the other to make it from day to day. She well knew it could also be about poetry and creativity and purpose. Camaraderie and friendship and love. But those had always seemed like lofty ideas for other people.

In some other life, if she wasn’t who she was, could she have been one of the Saturday Nighters? Could she even have penned a poem or two or perhaps a short story? Shared it with an eager audience? And if it could happen in another life, what was stopping it from happening in this one? Maybe the biggest thing holding her back now was the limits of her own imagination. Maybe the problem was her.

while men’s bodies were fragile and easily broken, the stories that went lost and unremembered could do just as much damage as any stick or disease.

There ain’t too much true about history that survives the telling. Once your time is done and you head Over There, you get to watch the rumors about your life and times turn into lies that turn into myths.

If you lived righteous, then you hope those who knew you remember the truth, but whether or not that truth can last for more than a generation… well, maybe it weren’t meant to.

a destiny ain’t just a book written by some divine hand up on high telling everything that’s going to happen in your life. It’s possibility, the beginning of a path each man walks, separate but not alone, because our destinies are all linked together.

if you want somebody else to buy what you’re selling them, you gotta believe it too. You can’t show any doubts or the audience will feel it. Deep in their bones. You show fear or waver in any way, then that’s what they focus on. You believe your own story, that you’re the greatest coin illusionist that ever lived?” She shrugged and grabbed her teacup again. “You make them all believe what you want them to.”

“Being rich and educated and privileged don’t make you a better person.”

‘Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly,’