The Book of Night Women

by Marlon James

the white pickneys reach the age when they become white and nigger become black and they don’t play together no more.

Homer whiter than plenty white man, it seem. But nothing make a nigger more black than whip scars.

Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will. A circle like the sun, a circle like the moon, a circle like bad tidings that seem gone but always, always come back.

In this place two thing matter more than most, how dark a nigger you be and where the white man choose to put you. One have all to do with the other.

Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will. A road set before every negro, from he slip through the slave ship or him mother pussy, that be just as dark. Black and long and wide like a thousand year. And when a negro walk, light get take away from him so he never know when he hit a curve or a bend. Worse, he never see that he walking round and round and always come back to where he leave first. That be why the negro not free.

—Me say, the thing with black woman, though, is that we don’t get what we want and we never get what we need, but every nigger, I mean every nigger, get what she deserve.

Preacher tell nigger that God is man and baby. Then he say that God is baby in December but man only four month later. But then he say God is father and he is son and he is spirit. That sound like he breed himself to get himself, then kill himself. White man God perplexing like the white man.

Bad feeling is a country no woman want to visit. So they take good feeling any which way it come.

No black woman safe as long as white man alive. Plenty years me be here and that is the one thing that don’t change. This goin’ on long before you come this house and still goin’ on even when you gone