The Reformatory Quotes

“Florida’s soil is soaked with so much blood, it’s a wonder the droplets don’t seep between your toes with every step, Mama used to say.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Gloria had always found it silly that so much effort went into trying to send humans to space instead of learning how to get along on Earth.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“One thing I’ve learned,” Miz Lottie went on. “Everything seems fine until it ain’t. And then we come to see it wasn’t never ‘fine.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“don’t b’lieve in ‘evil’ in most ways,” Miz Lottie said. “I believe in the devil, all right, but man don’t need no help from Satan to do what folks call ‘evil.’ Man do evil ev’ry day and call it doin’ their job. Slave drivers was ‘doin’ their job,’ beatin’ the skin off folks. Slave catchers settin’ dogs to rip out eyes and limbs. Don’t nobody know to this day how many Negro men and boys got kilt on McCormack’s land when Isaiah Timmons faced McCormack with a shotgun looking for his missing sons. Back in ’09, that was. I guess the sheriff was jus’ ‘doin’ his job’ when he rounded up men that had nothin’ to do with Timmons and his gun—and nobody saw ’em again. ’Cuz, see, colored folks fighting for what’s theirs is like a virus to white folks—and they kill a virus so it don’t spread. That killing is the work of man, not the devil. And if there’s any such thing as evil on this earth, Gloria, it’s here in Gracetown. In the soil, hear? Gracetown soil remembers. It’s like a mirror that shines yo’ ugly back at you.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Blue was gone without a goodbye. Robbie kept his eyes on the crow flying off as long as he could see it, but soon the black dot was out of sight, either too far or vanished into the air. Blue was headed somewhere Robert could not follow him—not yet, anyway. Robbie hoped wherever Blue was flying next would be a mystery for a long time. But he would write down the rules for haints so another kid who met another Blue would think twice before putting their life in a haint’s hands: Haints can look different ways. Haints usually come if you call their full names. Haints don’t like to be called haints. Haints can be fun as friends, but you have to look out for yourself or you might die like Redbone. Haints don’t say goodbye, except when they visit your dreams. And haints can kill you.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Cuz, see, colored folks fighting for what’s theirs is like a virus to white folks—and they kill a virus so it don’t spread.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“I don’t b’lieve in ‘evil’ in most ways,” Miz Lottie said. “I believe in the devil, all right, but man don’t need no help from Satan to do what folks call ‘evil.’ Man do evil ev’ry day and call it doin’ their job.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“We was a mighty and beautiful word.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“This land hid bones that had not been properly spoken for.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“No one person can be blamed for our nation’s current nightmare of mass incarceration.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“For the first time, she understood the liberation of having nothing left to lose.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Was this all life was? A series of experiences and then someone feeding you as if none of it had ever happened? As if you’d never left any impression on the world?”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“AUTHOR’S NOTE Although I had a true-life relative named Robert Stephens who died at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, in the 1930s, The Reformatory is a work of fiction. None of the characters, even young Robert Stephens himself, depict the lives and histories of real people. Gracetown is fictitious. I wrote this novel to honor the memory of Robert Stephens, so I depicted Redbone’s stabbing as an homage to Robert’s purported stabbing death in 1937 while he was imprisoned at Dozier. Robert’s earache reflects what University of South Florida forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle revealed to me about his remains, which were unearthed in 2015: he had an ear infection so severe that she could see evidence of it nearly eighty years later. I interviewed family members and survivors of the Dozier School, but no one I interviewed actually knew Robert Stephens or his parents because he died so long ago. His story in this novel is entirely fiction, including the persecution of his father, Robert Stephens, Sr. But I wanted to give Robert Stephens a happier ending. This character of Warden Fenton J. Haddock is also entirely fictitious. I created Haddock as an amalgam of a system of violence in children’s incarceration—but the truth is that no one person can explain away the reported events at the Dozier School, or the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, or the Indigenous “schools” in Canada where so many children were buried. No one person can be blamed for our nation’s current nightmare of mass incarceration. The Reformatory has a central villain, but the actual villain is a system of dehumanization.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“She’d told Gloria that whites had remarked to her that Waymon had “changed” since the war, how he unnerved people as he paraded to church in his Army uniform every Sunday. Waymon said he liked to remind people he had shed blood, and he might shed blood again.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Friends protect each other. That’s the only meaning of friendship in a place like this.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Smart people of good conscience lived everywhere, if only you looked for them.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Mama had kept most of her childhood stories locked in her eyes. Mama’s stories were unsuited for the ears of children—stories of evil without consequence and pain without cease—the unholy things that happen when God blinks. Or maybe sleeps. Surely God sleeps sometimes, Gloria thought; the evidence of slumber was all around.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Florida’s soil is soaked with so much blood, it’s a wonder the droplets don’t seep between your toes with every step,”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“We can’t expect justice in a racist court,” he said. “It happens from time to time, but most times it won’t. White juries are afraid of Negroes, so even our children seem dangerous on sight. That was the trap laid for Robbie before he ever kicked anyone.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Papa had taught him that if a McCormack addressed you—any white man, really, but especially a McCormack—you smiled like he was family you thought you’d lost in Normandy. You smiled like he was Christmas morning itself.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Whites thought Negroes were dumb because they didn’t let them say their piece—or didn’t listen when they did—”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“The sheriff was always on the side of white people, Papa had said, until white people tried to help Negroes.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Not all skin folk were kin folk, as the saying went. Gloria had seen it a hundred times.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Like Papa said, everyone knowing your name wasn’t always a blessing.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Or a petty retribution like his father had faced organizing workers in the AFL in New York before the war. As bad as that had been, he’d witnessed how much worse circumstances were for Negroes in the South, or even the poor crackers down here whose sole comfort was knowing they were better off than Negroes.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“actual villain is a system of dehumanization.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Guessing at a white man’s meaning was a dangerous game.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“What if he made plans instead of getting scared?”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“I’ll tell you honestly, Mr. Loehmann… this doesn’t feel to me like the country we say we are.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“Papa had told them that most white people in Chicago didn’t like Negroes either; they were just more quiet about it and didn’t post it on signs.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory