Quotes About Freedom

No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

Here's one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can't. Its scars will never fade.

It was crazy to run and crazy not to run. How could a boy look past the school's property line, see that free and living world beyond, and not contemplate a dash to freedom? To write one's own story for once. To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one's humanity

How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured.

The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.

Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of their triumphs.

a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief.

The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.

Money was new and unpredictable and liked to go where it pleased. Some

Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar

Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if 'all men' did not truly mean all men.

In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

But now that I been out and I been brought back, I nkow there's nothing in here that changes people. In here and out there are the same, but in here no one has to act fake anymore.

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. The

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man. Under

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?

Even if the adults were free of the shackles that had held them fast, bondage had stolen too much time. Only the children could take full advantage of their dreaming. If white men let them.

Or maybe she will keep it a garden. An anchor in the vicious waters of the plantation to prevent her from being carried away. Until she chose to be carried away.

His trick: Don't speculate where the slave is headed next. Concentrate instead on the idea that he is running away from

Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

He embraced the runaways with desperate affection. Cora couldn't help but shrink away. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom?

accomplice," Ridgeway said. "Caesar. Did it make

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo