Aleks

“It was nigh impossible to understand Howard's speech under normal circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told her, that half language was the voice of the plantation. They had been stolen from villages all over Africa and spoke a multitude of tongues. The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings. All the words except for the ones locked away by those who still remembered who they had been before. "They keep 'em hid like precious gold," Mabel said.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if 'all men' did not truly mean all men.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad