Own Son Quotes

“I had to watch my uncle get strung up when I was a child,” she finally said after she returned from the faraway place in her mind. “The white man would only sell us the rotten fruit and vegetables from their bug-infested baskets. We had to collect that mess from the back of the store like we were a pack of wild mutts picking through garbage. My uncle had had enough of his apples having maggots crawling out of them, so he started farming his own vegetables for us to eat. The white man didn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. It’s amazing how their minds work. The way their minds work is the reason we call them devils because only a devil could think the way they do. They were mad about the loss of profit because they no longer had us buying the filthy rot they peddled.
“My uncle produced such a high quality of fruits and vegetables that he had white folks coming to buy from him. It wasn’t too long after this started, those devils came in their white hoods and burned his garden to ash. Then they strung him up. We were forced to watch my uncle dangle from the neck while he pissed and shit himself. God will forgive my mouth saying it because he knows I only speak the truth. The evilness that resides inside the mind of those devils still exists in the minds of the ones who wear cop’s uniforms and judge’s robes. This is what our boys are up against. Our boys are at war! They freed us from our chains, so that they could lock us in their jails.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son

“Life in the black community has a different set of rules than the perfect America our schoolbooks go on about. Black people don’t live in that schoolbook America. Where we live, we are underpaid and over-policed, but at the same time, they expect us to work harder and longer just to get half of what they already got. It’s like they wanted us to eat dog shit, yet, they never allowed us to own dogs.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son

“At our church, there’s a saying, “you got the wrong vision,” which basically means you can’t see how good God is being because you’re too busy out there sinning. It also means, depending on the context, to shut the hell up talking to me like you’re crazy. No matter how you use the phrase, it really does have a way of getting the point across. For example: if a woman asked you for some money when she knows you got a house full of kids, an out-of-work husband, and a greedy, pedophile-looking landlord snipping at your heels, that’s when you hit them with, “Girl, you got the wrong vision.” As crazy as it sounds, it really is the nicest way to tell someone to fuck off.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son

“They want you to support their goals while you put your hopes and dreams on the back burner. They swear they’ll be there for you until your dying days. Then all of a sudden, after doing all of that for them to succeed, they find a younger version of you to love. A younger you who isn’t emotionally careworn and battle fatigued. A younger you that doesn’t have stretch marks on their belly. A younger you with perky boobs that hang in the right place even after they take their bra off. I don’t want to be some man’s stepping stone to the next woman he’s going to love. I don’t want to be some guy’s stepladder, when I can carefully climb over the same wall without his damn help.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son

“I laughed slightly and it sounded pure. I continued to get all of this mess off my chest while I could, “I find it telling, don’t you, that whenever you ask a man what type of woman he seeks or wants, his description always resembles the traits of a slave.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son