Freeman Quotes

“Sometimes, you simply must follow your heart," she said. "No reasonable man can blame you for that." A smile. "No reasonable woman can, either.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“There were few things more paralyzing than fear and worry, and she could not understand why other people—even Bonnie—withstood them so readily. The world was what it was, the future would be what it would be, and there was not much you could do to change either. So you did what you knew was right, you accepted the consequences, and you did not look back.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“Where there are no rights, there are no duties.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“It was skin, she decided. Only skin. And it had no power to add or subtract or otherwise alter her fundamental understanding of her own self.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“When the inky blackness above shades to a deep blue and the stars lose their hard edge and begin to seem unreal, she rises, wrapping the thin sheet about herself, and steps outside into the morning chill.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“What a cruel joke to lose his arm after the fighting was done. Or maybe that was wrong. Maybe that was the lesson here: that the fighting wasn’t done, after all. Maybe it never would be.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“She was so uncomfortable with these Southern Negroes, with their outlandish voices and unfettered laughter, their raucous worship and unlearned minds, their ignorance of words and places and ideas she took for granted. And she had never understood until, perhaps, just this night, the simple strength of them, the abiding courage of them, the unadorned wisdom of them.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“We had lost the argument,” she said. “You saw that as well as I.” “We could have tried,” he said. “We would have failed,” she said. “We already had.” “White folks scared, Bonnie. They do terrible things when they scared.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“You think they ever gon’ let us be free men, Sam? I mean, really free?” “I do not know,” said Sam. “It seems unlikely, does it not?” Ben shook his head. “Sho’ do. White folks been on top so long, they don’t know no other way. You can see it in the way they look at us everywhere we go, them hard, mean looks like, ‘What you doin’ walkin’ ’round down here like you think you somebody?’ You can see it in the way they shot Brother down like he were a mad dog.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“Shouldn’t of run,” he says. “That’s bad business, niggers running.” He is silent for a long time, staring down the road they have just walked. Then he says, “But they ain’t had to shoot him, I expect. Some of them nigger chasers, you know, they just plain don’t think. All they want to do is bring the nigger back. Don’t occur to them that you got to bring him back alive. Otherwise, what’s the point? What’s the value of a dead nigger?”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“When she was here on the east end of the street, when she was teaching or preparing lessons or chatting at dinner with Prudence and Ginny, she could almost forget where she was, forget that Buford, Mississippi was a beaten place and that the white people here hated her for it. She had raised no weapon against them, manned no artillery, occupied no territory. They hated her for existing, she supposed, hated her deeply yet impersonally, hated her before they knew her, before they saw her, before she uttered a single breath in their presence.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“John Cafferty had read the text of Lincoln’s inauguration address with his face congealed in a frown before passing the newspaper on to Jamie. “The man is a ditherer,” he complained, “begging the Southern states to turn from this foolish course they have set themselves on, plying them with promises to leave slavery alone if they would just consent to remain with the Union. The time for pleading with those people is over. Why not simply blockade their harbors, lay siege to their cities, stand up for right and do the Lord’s work without fear or compromise?” “He is not much,” Jamie had agreed, “but he is all we have.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“And what words existed for a world that had changed so profoundly as to be unrecognizable in the space of just days? They were free now. Free. And yet, if freedom didn’t mean you could choose your own name or walk where you wanted without challenge, then what did it mean? If it still required you to smile smiles you did not feel, to duck your head like a bashful boy and to put white folks on, maybe it had no meaning at all.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“would”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“Sorrow makes us all children again.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson said that.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman