Reconstruction Quotes

“Righteous or not, all vengeance bore poison fruit.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories

“Fear and courage, they can live together in a man."

"Indeed," said Flip, recovering from the specter of slave-catchers, "you could say that one is necessary for the other."

"Oh, sure," I said, "you boys have plenty of courage. But I'd say it ain't courage that grows alongside fear, that nurses from the same teat. It's fury.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction

“Anger that grows in the soil of deprivation is a holy fruit, while that which is sewn in the soil of overabundance grows crooked and full of poison.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction

“Wishful thinking is a powerful curse, almost as bad as storytelling.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction

“There is the fear of the bullet, and the fear of the noose. The fear of watching one you love march away and never return. And then that other, stranger fear. Not of losing everything but of everything twisting away from you; the promises made and received distorted like a reflection in muddy water, recognizable, but wrong. The fear not of death, but of sickness. An affliction that mimics life but removes, with merciless intent, its foundations”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories

“To my side, the three men shifted uneasily, shared significant looks. I had always known the grave limitations of their view of me. Deprivation is no even soil—the rich fruit of my anger was unknowable to these men with just a little more to hold onto.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories

“I was afraid of her, of my audacity in asking, but I was possessed of such bravery that is the bitter reward of despair.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories

“O spirits, o Great-grandmother, who resides in heaven with our Lord and Savior, I am weary and sore of heart. O Mama, I am willow-twisted and cracked in the roil and storm of this war. The nearer we are to freedom, the farther from peace. Justice smells of life everlasting and copper coins, and her voice is not a song, or a prayer, but a cry.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories