[b]Colson Whitehead
Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from.[/b]
That or finding out it wasn’t an accident at all.
Tipple sold his success much more effectively than he did. How to get excited about, take pride in something that came so naturally? It was like being honored for breathing.
Still, he thought, in this world a buck’s a buck.
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.
Some still being more forbidden than others.
The Declaration of Independence is like a map. You trust that it’s right but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.
Then [as with Constitution] being or not being a strict constructionist.
Live every minute as if you are late for the last train.
Or, if you are particularly in a hurry, the last flight.
It was nigh impossible to understand Howard’s speech under normal circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told her, that half language was the voice of the plantation. They had been stolen from villages all over Africa and spoke a multitude of tongues. The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings. All the words except for the ones locked away by those who still remembered who they had been before. “They keep 'em hid like precious gold,” Mabel said.
Not of much use now one suspects. But point taken.