James

I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.

gave a language lesson. These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency. The young ones sat on the packed-dirt floor and I was on one of our two homemade stools. The hole in the roof pulled the smoke from the fire that burned in the middle of the shack. “Papa, why do we have to learn this?”

oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.

“Never speak first,” a girl said.

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,”

“I don’t like white folks,” he said. “And I is one.”

François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy.

There were those slaves who claimed a distinction between good masters and cruel masters. Most of us considered such to be distinction without difference. I