More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Children are curious about justice. Sometimes they are shocked by their encounters with its opposite.
They say to themselves: Things are not right. But children also experiment with injustice, with cruelty. To stress-test the structure of the adult world. To find out exactly what its rules are.
Imagine thinking of history this way! As a thing personally directed at you. As a series of events structured to make you feel one way or another, rather than the precondition of all our lives?
Far beneath the “black-white” racial strife of America, there persists a global underclass of Maggies, unseen and unconsidered within the parochial American conversation,
Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them.
His grandmother is a porch swing older than his father and when they talk about streets and avenues and buildings they call them names they no longer have.
“So you’re happy.” “Very.” “That’s good,” she said and nodded her head. “I always hoped you’d be happy.
We both giggled. Really giggled. Suddenly, in just a pulse beat, twenty years disappeared and all of it came rushing back.
Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Is your mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Oh—and an understanding nod.
