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Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
Without roots, things die.
There was freedom in this new kind of smallness, an exhilarating sense that she was in the world, and not just passing through it at a white man’s pace.
“Me mother to no one, so me try to be mother to all.
Even under the shade of the canopy, the constellation of dewdrops on the tree’s trunk shimmered.
“The connection between all things. That we can’t just take; we must also give.” Mama B, too, touched the place on the tree where the bark had been peeled away. “All healing start from there.”
The antithesis of loss; a joy and relief as deep as the pain of the initial separation.
“We all got our gifts—the things we see that others can’t. All we can do is use them when the time come.”
As if the only question that mattered was: Who owns you? She thought of her own name, written again and again in the same place under the same master. If she died tomorrow, was that what would be left of her? Just her name
This loathsome register that, in her head, was heavier than anything she had ever carried in her life, that could crush her to nothing under the immense weight of its thousands of names on thousands of pages—this was what would take her to her children?
They had died because they dared to fight against the path that had been chosen for them,
There were other paths.
it was once Dutch.
No one knows the value of freedom more than an ex-slave.”
“Because someone help me when me need it. And you should not take help if you not gon’ give it when the time comes.”
She gave herself permission to live, as she had given herself permission to live before.
That’s the beauty of freedom, he say. You never know what gon’ happen next.
Memories cannot raise the dead.
So there was something about the passing of a parent. A cosmic weight that shifted onto the generation below. A child could leave the world without a whisper, but a parent’s death made itself known.
She would rather imagine her children living than know them to be dead.
what had come before was more like sedation—like the thick, heavy fog of a dreamless sleep. Yes, the knowing hurt her—aching pain, searing pain, creeping pain: she felt them all.
But if she could go back and erase the memory, erase Orion’s
story, and live her whole life in darkness,...
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“If anyone is wandering here, Rachel, it’s you.”
“They are living the life my mother wanted,” Nuno said. “The inland life, far from the white man.
Pain, loss, dislocation, a search for home—each one of them knew these, too, in their own way.
the connection between all things.
“Some love the past. It’s all they have left. They want to tell it and retell it. They want to pass it on, to keep it alive. Some do not. For us, what counts is that we escape.”
All me want to do is live the life in front of me, because it’s a miracle me make it here.”
Hope hurts.
What life did she have in front of her? How did it differ from the life that lay behind?
humble, functional beauty.
Freedom means stepping over the plantation boundary. But what then? It can be hard to live after freedom.”
She felt that if any god or gods existed, they would be diffused throughout everything and everyone on earth, neither benevolent nor malign, but simply existing, drawing everything together, living and dead.
but the beauty was in the strangeness.
The smile vanished from his face. “Go? Where?” “Trinidad.”
“Freedom mean something different to me. The search, that is the freedom.”
“It’s not that me want to leave. It’s that me can’t stay.”
Happiness, sadness, history, hope—they were all there in this dance, performed in the middle of this mongrel village of lost souls who had found one another.
The Demerara carried the canoe along with its current, requiring only gentle paddling on their part,
Inside, Rachel caught glimpses of Port of Spain’s high society, amusing themselves with tea and sumptuous spreads of food. The people looked like paintings, frozen behind the glass, barely moving except to nibble at pastries or sip from their cups, while dark-skinned maids waited in corners to be of assistance.
Micah would carry Cherry Jane on his shoulders, laughing and telling her that one day she would be as tall as when she sat up there.
was Rachel’s job to teach Cherry Jane that family could not be forgotten.
“He fight for his freedom, and they kill him for it.”
and this elegant mulatto woman before her she understood even less.
Thomas Augustus—shorter and darker than Cherry Jane—who had chosen a life in the forests rather than in the heart of society,
had a sister turn her back on the family in pursuit of whiteness,
He told her his name was Abraham.
There was not so much strength in dignified suffering
What more do they want?
