Quotes About Oppression

Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness.

Cora hoped the musicians wouldn't think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

Cora remembered Caesar's words about the men at the factory who were hunted by the plantation, carrying it here despite the miles. It lived in them. It still lived in all of them, waiting to abuse and taunt when chance presented itself.

Women and animals, you only have to break them in once, he said. They stay broke. All

White men squabbled before judges over claims to this or that tract hundreds of miles away that had been carved up on a map. Slaves fought with equal fervor over their tiny parcels at their feet.

the patrollers were the law: white, crooked, and merciless. Drawn from the lowest and most vicious segment, too witless to even become overseers.

The patroller required no reason to stop a person apart from color.

Cora thought he had a mean face, like a burl sprouting from a squat, sweaty trunk.

Then it comes, always—the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.

Stubborn breaks when it don't bend, and his family had spent too much time with the kindly white folks in the north. Kindly in that they didn't see fit to kill you fast. One thing about the south, it was not patient when it came to killing negroes. In

When black blood was money, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.

The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings.

Stolen bodies working stolen land.

True, you couldn't treat an Irishman like an African, white nigger or no.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that's what you do when you take away someone's babies--steal their future. Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better.

In effect, they abolished slavery. On the contrary, Oney Garrison said in response. We abolished niggers.

She didn't agree with the popular arguments for slavery but saw it as a necessary evil given the obvious intellectual deficiencies of the African tribe. To free them from bondage all at once would be disastrous—how would they manage their affairs without a careful and patient eye to guide them?

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won't survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities. She minded her place.

A free black walks different than a slave," he said. "White people recognize it immediately, even if they don't know it. Walks different, talks different, carries himself different. It's in the bones.

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood.

The previous night in Tennessee, Ridgeway had called Cora and her mother a flaw in the American scheme. If two women were a flaw, what was a community? —

She thought of the picking, how it raced down the furrows at harvest, the African bodies working as one, as fast as their strength permitted. The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights. When the slaves finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them.

Master said the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun," he told them, "was a nigger with a book. That must be a big pile of black powder, then!" When

When she got older, she described herself as a student of American history, attuned to the inevitable. She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.