水中舞者

• 豆友138864207

  2020-04-02
  My Sophia had not been a woman to me. She had been an emblem, an ornament, a sign of someone long ago lost, someone whom I now glimpsed only in the fog, someone whom I could not save. Oh, my dear dark mother. The screams. The voices. The water. You were lost to me, lost, and there was nothing I could do to save you.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-04-01
  Put before something they can’t understand, people got a tendency to talk—and also to make something bigger than what they actually saw.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-04-01
  Slavery was the root of all struggle. For it was said that the factories enslaved the hands of children, and that child-bearing enslaved the bodies of women, and that rum enslaved the souls of men.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-04-01
  They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and named a square for their liberating general.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-04-01
  I saw them that day at the Philadelphia docks, praying, “Hide the outcast, betray not him that wandereth.” I saw them wandering on Bainbridge and crying for all their dead, those who had taken ship for the final harbor from whence none shall return. All of them came to me, from the papers, from the memories, all of them drawn up from Pandemonium, up from Slavery, up out of the jaw of the Abomination, up out from under the juggernaut’s wheels, singing before the sorcery of this Underground.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-31
  In that moment all the rage of everything from my mother to Maynard to Sophia to Thena to Corrine, all the lies, all the losses, all that they had done to me in the jail parlor, all the violation, all my impotence for the little boy in my cell, for the old man who loved the wife of his son, for the days they’d chased me into the woods—all of it came up there and vented itself on a dead man.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-31
  There was no “nigger car.” Why would there be one? The Quality kept their Tasked ones close the way a lady keeps her clutch, closer even, for this was a time in our history when the most valuable thing a man could own, in all of America, was another man.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-30
  I knew them. I knew their children, their wives, their enemies. Their humanity wounded me, for here too were the bonds of family, and here too were young lovers overrun by the rituals of courting, and here too lay a sorrow, a grim understanding of the sin of the Task. And here too were fears that in the last calculation they too were slaves to some Power, some God, some Demon of the old world, which they had unknowingly unleashed upon the new. I nearly loved them. My work demanded no less: I must reach beyond all my particular hatred and pain, see them in their fullness, and then, with my pen, strike out and destroy them.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-30
  “But freedom, true freedom, is a master too, you see—one more dogged, more constant, than any ragged slave-driver,” she said. “What you must now accept is that all of us are bound to something. Some will bind themselves to property in man and all that comes forthwith. And others shall bind themselves to justice. All must name a master to serve. All must choose.”
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-30
  I fell and there was now mud in my nose, mud in my mouth. And I remember the feeling of relief coming over me, relief from all my muscles finally at rest. But even then, even down there, I could still see the light of freedom, dim and blue. I heard voices now—a muddle of cries and yells—and I knew that soon they would be upon me. Rise, I told myself. Rise. Slowly now, my fingers grasped at the mud, my palms pushed in deep, and I was then on my hands and knees. Rise. And one knee was up and then another, and then I was standing again.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-29
  Slavery is everyday longing, is being born into a world of forbidden victuals and tantalizing untouchables—the land around you, the clothes you hem, the biscuits you bake. You bury the longing, because you know where it must lead. But now this new longing held out a different future, one where my children, whatever their travails, would never know the auction block. And once I glimpsed that other future, my God, the world was born anew to me.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-28
  There were even darker tasks. To be their eyes and ears, their intelligence among the other tasking men, so that they, the masters, knew who smiled in their faces and scoffed behind their backs, who stole from them, who burned down the barn, who poisoned and who plotted. The effect of all this was a kind of watchfulness among the tasking folks, in particular toward those you did not know. This worked the other way too, so that if you were new to Lockless or any of these other houses of bondage, you took things slow, you did not question or inquire on people’s affairs, for if you did you might then be thought to be among those who were eyes and ears, who tasked beyond the Task, and this was a dangerous place because then you yourself might be poisoned or plotted against.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-28
  She was such a lovely girl, and I wanted to be with her in a way that I would never want anyone again, in a way that age and experience rob you of, which is to say I wanted all of her, from her coffee skin to her brown eyes, from her soft mouth to her long arms, from her low voice to her wicked laugh. I wanted it all. And I was not thinking of all the terror that came with that, the terror that had swallowed her life. All I was thinking about was the light dancing in me, dancing to some music I hoped only she would hear.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-28
  The Quality, for instance, did not inquire on the inner workings of their “people.” They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only in the thinnest way possible. To strip a man down, condemn him to be beaten, flayed alive, then anointed with salt water, you cannot feel him the way you feel your own. You cannot see yourself in him, lest your hand be stayed, and your hand must never be stayed, because the moment it is, the Tasked will see that you see them, and thus see yourself. In that moment of profound understanding, you are all done, because you cannot rule as is needed. You can no longer ensure that the tobacco hillocks are raised to you...
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-28
  “You used to live down here, huh?” she said.“In that cabin right there,” I said, pointing. “And then later when I took up with Thena, farther down.”“You miss it?” she asked.“Sometimes, I guess,” I said. “But if I’m honest, I wanted to come up. I had dreams back then. Big dumb dreams. Dead and gone.”“And what do you dream of now?” she asked.“After what I just came up from?” I said. “Breathing. I just dream of breathing.”
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-27
  Because we in the Warrens lived among them, we knew first-hand that they took the privy as all others, that they were young and stupid, and old and frail, and that their powers were all a fiction. They were no better than us, and in so many ways worse.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-26
  I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown. Love was not concerned with any deep knowledge of its object, of their wants and dreams, but mainly with the joy felt in their presence and the sickness felt in their departure.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-26
  As I mounted each step, I felt the terrible logic of the Task, my Task, snap into place. It was not just that I would never be heir to even one inch of Lockless. And it was more than knowing I would never be a subscriber to the fruit of my own labor. It was also that my own natural wants must forever be bottled up, that I must live in fear of those wants, so that more than I must live in fear of the Quality, I must necessarily live in fear of myself.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-03-25
  But I now knew the truth—that Maynard’s folly, though more profane, was unoriginal. The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them—we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.
• 豆友138864207

  2020-04-02
  Oh, to be back there, and be young again. To be seated in the dawning hours of my life, the sun of everything breaking over the horizon, and all the promises and tragedies ahead of me. To be there in that chaise, with a day-pass, and a girl I loved more than anything, in the last doleful days of old and desolate Virginia. Oh, to be there with time to spare, with time to dream of riding out as far as that Elm County road went until fortune abandoned us.