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As we excavate history through fiction, we can confront the injustices of our past as a way to shed light on our present and work toward a more equitable future.
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.
When the hurricanes came, they ripped up even the sturdiest trees; and when the white men came, they tore children out of their mothers’ arms. And so, we learned to live without hope. For us, loss was the only thing that was certain.
Mothers turned their heads when a baby was born, refusing to meet its eyes.
Without roots, things die. Many of us did die, at the hands of the white men or in the heat of the midday sun. The soil ran rich with our blood, and the roots fed on our bodies. It made the roots strong. Shallow, but strong. There was hope for this new world, after all.
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.
“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.”
This was the real power of slavery, the long shadow it could cast after its formal end—that even with all this distance between her and Providence, Rachel still lived in fear.
Rachel chose not to mention that, as she was no longer a slave, the Lord could not judge her for being so.
Mary Grace wasn’t beautiful—she was plain and her features were spread a little too wide across her face. But, as always, Hope’s words rearranged the world, and for a moment Mary Grace was beautiful.
It suddenly struck her as strange that this place would be so dear to Hope, but then Rachel knew some people preferred to keep painful memories close.
They knew what it was to search for something—to be exhausted, bent double by the weight of loss, but somehow still crawling on their knees, hands outstretched, fumbling in the dark to find the pieces of whatever had been shattered.
