Sky Full of Elephants

I don’t believe there has ever been a more terrible weapon in this world than the word they.

If healing our wounds breaks the world, then let it break.

White isn't a race, it's an idea.

Like her, all they knew, because all they'd been trained, was how well to suffer. And perhaps be rewarded by the consolation ot endurance. How does anyone begin to free themselves from the cycle of that type of conflict? Such struggle assumes an enemy one cannot punch or kick or kill. One that ravages memory and future alike. One no amount of apologies could satisfy. Conflict one lives with and tries, mightily, to live better than it demands.

I've always thought of it like a sky full of elephants," Herald said absently, as though he weren't speaking to Charlie but to different versions of himself. "It's up there, been up there, heavy too. All wisdom and memory… sorrow. A weight so heavy it would damn us all if it came down. But you can't see it 'til you see it. No matter how many times I tell you they're up there, you can't see 'em until you see 'em.

The things white folks put people through--my god, cruel in ways I just can't even reconcile. Should be ashamed for a thousand years for all the lynching and raping, using people like goddamn animals." "Not all white people," Sidney added. "My mother wouldn't have been a part of this. She shouldn't've had to feel shame for something she didn't do." "Shouldn't she?" Sailor cut eyes at Charlie and then in the rearview mirror at Sidney. "Feeling what deserves to be felt is the only pathway to understanding. Let's get it straight: white folks did rape and steal and kill, and black folks died by the thousands--was dying all the way up 'til a year ago. Never feeling shame for that, and not allowing us to feel anger over it, means we don't evolve. We just go on repeating evil we can't understand. I'm sure your momma was a nice lady with a good heart, but her not feeling ashamed about all that happened is the same as not feeling anything at all.

All power on Earth was built around what it could exploit. It leveraged, burned, absorbed. stored, and monetized every ounce of what the natural world could produce. Even solar power tapped the one sun in the sky, all systems and studies based on the measurements of monetization. One way, one sun. And we were all blinded.

Young black boys, Charlie thought, the most marvelous beings in the universe. As nonchalantly as Herald bit into that fruit did black boys ever ponder their influence on the whole world. How effortlessly they rounded the shape of the earth with their swagger and illuminated its days with their creativity. Their hope, Charlie mused, offered even the bleakest parts of our planet a second sun.

Magic is just all science at once.

You're locked up here in your castle thinking we are all damned. But we're the lucky ones." "Lucky how?" "Lucky because the world has tried to destroy me in every kind of way, but I am still here. So are you. So are a lot of good people. Ain't no other people in the history of the world ever had so little of a serving of living as us. And now, we got all of it.

She longed for the shape of the rifle in her hand. How easily the gun made the world change the way she wanted.

The monument reminded everyone in the city that some of its residents used to be somebody’s property. A threat, Vivian understood, packaged as heritage.

How do you mean?” “We finally inherited the earth and can’t remember who we was back when it was promised to us to begin with.

Your value is decided on all the things you are willing to accept about yourself. And what you won't.

I ain't ever felt special my whole life." "What did you feel?" "Hard to explain. Felt like the opposite of special. Like a big black void moving through the world. Empty, if not for all the people trying to fill it with their own judgments on me." "The thing about voids, Charlie Brunton, is ain't nothing inside of them but light they can't figure out how to free.

We discovered there were other ways to live. When our time came to come back to America, we brought those ways with us. And, no, Mobile is not the paradise you imagine, at least not yet. But we came to learn paradise is the mind. What you believe about yourself. What you know about yourself. We have a lot of work to do, and we know it will never be perfect. But better is a direction. As long as we progress, together, we will be all right. Mobile is movement. We are all movement.

Mississippi is the shadow, the soul, and the skeleton closet of the nation. If America had ruins, Mississippi would be it. Every step you take got blood in the soil.

You can't deny the truth of it: it's scary and it's unknown. That's a fact. But it's also a fact that scary and unknown is how everything has always been.

White ain't a people. White is a spell they put on themselves. Losing they minds in it too much is probably what killed 'em. So there can't be a white colony, because white ain't an idea no more.

But like the bulk of a mountain broken down by wind and water, truth devolves. With enough lies, one cannot defend himself with his own truth no more than stone can stop a river. So, what is a truth when fact is no longer accepted as true? Charlie's courtroom verdict made its own facts about him, facts prison eagerly endorsed. The years to follow meant he no longer had to think about truth or lies anymore. What happened happened. And there wasn't enough truth in all the world to change it.

I’ve always thought of it like a sky full of elephants,” Herald said absently, as though he weren’t speaking to Charlie but to different versions of himself. “It’s up there, been up there, heavy too. All wisdom and memory… sorrow. A weight so heavy it would damn us all if it came down. But you can’t see it’til you see it. No matter how many times I tell you they’re up there, you can’t see’em until you see’em.

The thing about voids, Charlie Brunton, is ain’t nothing inside of them but light they can’t figure out how to free.

Parenting isn’t as much about them as it is about you. Don’t matter who they are or who they want to be, you love and support them. Make space for it, understand? Not just raising them, but changing ourselves in the process. We spend too much time trying to wedge our children into something we think is right rather than following their lead. I don’t want my child to carry what I carry, to feel what I feel. I want Zu to be free. And the only way to be free is to set them free.

Make them angry—make them feel invaded—for doing nothing at all but breathing the same air through a different-looking nose.

what exactly did she think that made her?

The world got left to the heathens. That’s why everything is going to hell outside these walls. You

neither grief nor calamity had ever stopped the joy of black people. We smiled through the worst the world had to offer