The Coming Quotes

“Perhaps future generations, the beautiful ones unborn, would wonder how we survived it all. What would we say? Or, more probably, what would history say for us? It would not speak truth. Not whole truth. It could not.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“The pain of what happened next lives in our collective memory. It mauls our souls each day. Yet it must be told. Silence guarantees no healing. It promises that the child's life would be forgotten and that its mission might, one day, be thought significant. Silence is the enemy of history, and history is all we have.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“Among us lived every spirit conceivable. Men who loved women, women who loved men. Women who loved women, men who loved men. These were not choices but life assignments. Everyone had one.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“When we’d had slaves, we’d purchased people’s labor—not their bodies! We never thought we owned someone’s arms, legs, feet, heart. How was that possible? How much does an arm cost? A leg? Feet? Hands? How”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“We had been concerned with complex, invisible knowledge, when we should’ve also been searching for God in simple things. Senior”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“Truth was, they died as we died. It made sense. The universe demands life for life.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“We were wonderful, but we were not flawless. We knew excellence because we knew failure. We were human beings.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“Our names told us who we were. They told us why we’d been sent. What was expected of us. We were not confused. We were not ashamed. We were not perfect, but we were excellent.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“Our body parts were the trademark, we believed, of a sacred, majestic people. Now the ugliness of our situation made us begin to loathe the body we’d once loved. It was a gradual occurrence at first, more a thought than a truth, but we knew that once planted, a seed soon reveals all that it bears.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“A life of leisure destroys a child. When there’s nothing to work for, there’s nothing to gain, nothing to die for. So we had to die that we might live again.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“That’s why he’d bought her. He’d already imagined the children she’d bear and the cotton she’d pick and the house she’d clean every day of her life.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“The power of speech does not rely upon meaning. Words carry energy all by themselves.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“Some never spoke another word. Some never married. Some couldn’t look at a woman again, even their own mothers and sisters. Some wanted to touch and hold lovers, but their arms could not embrace.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“It was a peculiar odor, the smell of sexual violation, a mixture of rotting flesh and underarm stench. They shivered even though the heat belowdecks would’ve suffocated the weak. Our desecrated brothers survived because, as best we could, we reminded them of who they were.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“Occasionally, young men, too, were thus violated. They fought like cornered lions. It always took three or four crewmen to subdue one of our boys.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“They couldn’t have known that slowly, year by year, the ocean’s water would ingest a people’s fury so completely that hurricanes would come each season and claim lives in recompense for Africans gone overboard.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“The power of speech does not rely upon meaning. Words carry energy all by themselves. They vibrate through the air, with the intention of the speaker, shaping consciousness and touching hearts whether understood or not.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“We’d all been taught that, in a circle, there is no beginning, no end. Energy flows without ceasing. One can enter and exit without ever disrupting it. Something magical happens when people gather in a circle. Individual identities swirl into a collective self, which wields far more spiritual force than any one person alone. We”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“They could justify our abuse simply because we were something they were not. At least in appearance. And such difference, particularly in color, undoubtedly equaled a fundamental inequity in their minds. None”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“The power of speech does not rely upon meaning. Words carry energy all by themselves. They”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“People determined to survive are willing to sacrifice anything to achieve that end. Captors”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“A life of leisure destroys a child. When”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“Now we know that prophesies come to one generation and materialize in another. If”
― Daniel Black, The Coming

“We were the Fon, the Ibo, the Hausa, the Ashanti, the Mandinka, the Ewe, the Tiv, and the Ga. We were the Fante, the Fulani, the Ijaw, the Mende, the Wolof, the Yoruba, the BaKongo, and the Mbundu. We were the Serere, the Akan, the Bambara and the Bassa. And we were proud. We knew our ancestors by name. They”
― Daniel Black, The Coming