Black Water Rising Quotes

“I think the hope has always been that you see what you see, and you take us anyway, for who we are,” the Rev says. “Not that we all go around pretending we’re the same. I don’t see how that helps anybody.” Carlisle”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“To see a Confederate flag flying outside someone’s home or in the back window of a pickup truck is about as accurate a warning system as a man could hope for, like the engine light coming on in your car a few miles before something may or may not blow up; it’s a caution before trouble starts, offering a clean window of time in which to make a run for it.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“The truth is, he had to beg Bernie to go with him. And it certainly wasn’t to put his wife at ease. After years of practicing law, he’s learned that women put men in one of two categories: the ones they know are trying to fuck them and the ones they’re not so sure about yet. Bringing his wife on interviews helps female witnesses relax. It roots him in some way that matters to women.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“Even then he thought he’d shoot a motherfucker before he’d let them spit on him. He wanted something more than the early movement’s fight for legal equality and freedom in the streets. Jay’s dream was for freedom in his own mind, liberation from the kind of soul-crushing fear that took his father’s life. So he marched and wrote speeches and armed himself for a coming revolution…until they arrested him and locked him in a jail cell, threatened to take his life away, holding him to answer on shaky evidence and flat-out lies. It was a courtroom instead of a country road. Still, they killed his spirit.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“Keep your head down, speak only when spoken to. A warning drilled into him every day of his life growing up in Nigton, Texas, née Nig Town, née Nigger Town (its true birth name when it sprang up a hundred years ago in the piney woods of East Texas).”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“At the Sugar Oaks Plantation, there are lawn jockeys at attention on the clipped lawn in front of the clubhouse. They are not black so much as they are tan—not exactly white, but rather some reassuring shade of brown, the universal color of good service. They are meant as a reminder that somebody, somewhere, is working harder than you.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“The concept of integration is based on the assumption that there is not value in the Negro community…”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“Money, it turns out, is the new Jim Crow.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“Sugar Land, Texas, the crown jewel of Fort Bend County, was founded more than a hundred years ago as a cotton and sugar plantation. Which, apparently, is license enough for real estate developers to boldly embrace “plantation-style living”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“The black cop cuts a look at his white partner, showing off. “I asked you a question,” he says, digging his finger into Jay’s sternum. Jay is slow to answer the cop, resenting the need to justify himself to a kid who wouldn’t even have a job on the police force if it weren’t for the civil rights Jay’s generation marched and died for. “You want to take your hand off me?”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“And he remembers the judge’s warning. There were to be no outbursts in the courtroom, no matter the verdict. Then, adding his own two cents, the judge said, “I don’t have an ounce of respect for you, boy. The nigra issue is an important one in this country. But you boys goin’ ’bout it the wrong way. And that’s all I’m ’on say on it.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“Charlie, on the other hand, is trying to act casual—the reason for meeting in this place, Jay realizes. Or maybe it was meant to throw Jay off his game. It’s a certain kind of man can look at pussy while he eats, never mind talking business at the same time.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“And no matter how hard he tries, he simply can’t picture himself walking into a police station and offering information that ties him to some other shooting…certainly not with his felony arrest record. Free advice he gives to any prospective client who walks through the door: don’t volunteer anything to a cop that he didn’t ask for in the first place. Keep your fucking mouth shut.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“Practicing law, he would soon find out, is like running any other small business. Most days he’s just trying to make his overhead: insurance and filing fees, Eddie Mae’s meager salary, plus $500 a month to lease the furnished office space on West Gray. He, quite frankly, can’t afford his principles.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“When he's within loving distance of her arms she grabs hold of his neck. In his ear she exhales. One breath. One syllable. She whispers his name, his father's first initial. On the stairs she's two steps taller than he is and it something, he feels, to look up to this woman, to be held up by his wife.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

“Rev says, “pretending people aren’t black is not the way to equality. It’s not even possible, first of all. Any more than I can pretend you aren’t who you are.”
― Attica Locke, Black Water Rising