Quotes from Bliss Broyard

My father suggested in an early draft that the hipster "became a criminal because he was not allowed to become a citizen.

These boxes held only ashes of answers, and all their presence meant was more mysteries, and a worry that someday something else might explode.

The minute you let other people label you, you let them take away your power.

Years later I'd understand that a mark of adulthood is the ability to live with uncertainty. But back then I wanted to figure everything out, myself most of all.

Dating across the color line was just another way of bucking convention. But since my father neither looked nor identified as black, there wasn't much risk of public censure. The women could be daring and modern without being truly radical.

P.B.S. Pinchback, a black politician originally from Mississippi and a supporter of Governor Warmoth's, put it more bluntly: "It is wholesale falsehood to say that we wish to force ourselves upon white people." In his view blacks "could get no rights the whites did not see fit to give them." But the colored Creoles couldn't reconcile this attitude with their urgent desire "to be respected and treated

the Democrats' tactics of intimidation, bribery, and fraud gave the party control of elective offices across the state. In

Equal rights before the law, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, all of these things were...trampled underfoot and spat upon.

Pinchback later explained himself: "I have learned to look at things as they are and not as I would have them....This country, at least so far as the South is concerned, is a white man's country....What I wish to impress upon my people, is that no change is likely to take place in our day and in general that will reverse this order of things.

The close election results demonstrated the ability of black voters to decide a race when whites were divided.

All parents must reconcile their fantasies for their children with the choices their kids actually make.

Along the way my loyalties had shifted without my even realizing it.

Years later I'd understand that a mark of adulthood is the ability to live with uncertainty.

It's said that the hearing is the last sense to go when someone is dying.

You know, Blissy, just because you share blood with someone doesn't mean you have to like them,

But in that lightning moment that exposed the country's deep racial divide, there was something about O.J.'s going free that, to my surprise, made me inexplicably happy.

dying should be like a birthday party to end all birthday parties.