Sublime

Here was evidently a people highly skilled, efficient, caring for their country as a florist cares for his costliest orchids.

He cannot understand how the white man can show the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking he is inherently superior.

He was a nightmare of unmeaning idiocy.

“But the law says…” “Good ain’t got nuttin’ to do wif da law. Law says I’m a slave.”

“Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.” “Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?” Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”

The broken oasis is a motif in the post-emancipation South. Wilmington is but one example. Others include Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida. And Little Hayti, not the one in Miami but the long-lost Black town near Durham, named after the first Black republic and birthplace to Vogue’s André Leon Talley. And Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville,

They had no enemies;

Blacks were forbidden to vote in elections, to study in white schools, to buy in white stores, to eat in white restaurants, to sleep in white hotels. The justification for all of this was that blacks were foul, slothful and vicious, so whites had to be protected from them. Whites did not want to sleep in the same hotel as blacks or to eat in the

White people did everything within their power to define black reality, to tell us who we were—and their definition, of course, extended no further than their social, political, and economic interests. They tried to make us believe that God created black people to be white people's servants. We blacks, therefore, were expected to enjoy plowing