Sula

“We made a mistake, sir. You see, there wasn’t no sign. We just got in the wrong car, that’s all. Sir.” “We don’t ’low no mistakes on this train. Now git your butt on in there.”

about. I mean, everything in the world loves you. White men love you. They spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their own. The only thing they want to do is cut off a nigger’s privates. And if that ain’t love and respect I don’t know what is. And white women? They chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you under ev

And it was natural that he, after all, became the first one to join Shadrack—Tar Baby and the deweys—on National Suicide Day.

Helene Wright was an impressive woman, at least in Medallion she was. Heavy hair in a bun, dark eyes arched in a perpetual query about other people’s manners. A woman who won all social battles with presence and a conviction of the legitimacy of her authority.

they regarded integration with precisely the same venom that white people did.

They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable. In that way,

So soon. So soon. She hadn’t even begun the trip back. Back to her grandmother’s house in the city where the red shutters glowed, and already she had been called “gal.”

“Well, don’t let your mouth start nothing that your ass can’t stand. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.” “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.