The Book of Negroes

To gaze into another persons face is to do two things: to recognise their humanity and to assert your own.

You must learn to respect," Papa said. But I do not respect her," I said. Papa paused for a moment, and patted my leg. "Then you must learn to hide your disrespect.

I remember wondering, within a year or two of taking my first my first steps, why only men sat to drink tea and converse, and why women were always busy. I reasoned that men were weak and needed rest.

Reading felt like a daytime dream in a secret land. Nobody but I knew how to get there, and nobody but I owned that place

Some say that I was once uncommonly beautiful, but I wouldn't wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.

I had learned that there were times when fighting was impossible, when the best thing to do was to wait and to learn.

She asked why I was so black. I asked why she was so white. She said she was born that way. Same here, I replied.

Sometimes a deal with the devil is better than no deal at all.

But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

Today you live, child. Tomorrow, you dream.

If the sky was so perfect, why was the earth all wrong

To gaze into another person's face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.

Someone knows my name. Seeing you makes me want to live.

Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble.

I stood up to take some air outside. The stars were brilliant that night, and the cicadas were crying in endless song. If the sky was so perfect, why was the earth all wrong?

In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

just want to read more books and be a knowledgeable female.

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied. Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning.

I looked up from the street and again at the wretched captives. I vowed not to let the noises of the city drown out their voices or rob me of my past. It was less painful to forget, but I would look and I would remember.

Never have I met a person doing terrible things who would meet my own eyes peacefully. To gaze into another person's face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.

I concluded that no place in the world was entirely safe for an African, and that for many of us, survival depended on perpetual migration.

We, the survivors of the crossing, clung to the beast that had stolen us away. Not a soul among us had wanted to baord that ship, but once out on open waters, we held on for dear life. The ship became an extension of our own rotting bodies. Those who were cut from the heaving animal sank quick to their deaths, and we who remained attached wilted more slow as poison festered in our bellies and bowels. We stayed with the beast until new lands met our feet, and we stumbled down the long plants just before the poison became fatal. Perhaps here in this new land, we would keep living.

I don't govern my life according to danger

I knew that it would be called the United States. But I refused to speak that name. there was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains

When it comes to understanding others,” I said, “we rarely tax our imaginations.

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

I had chosen freedom, with all its insecurities, and nothing in the world would make me turn away from it.

I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.

For this child of mine, home would be me. I would be home. I would be everything for this child until we went home together.

Some say that I was once uncommonly beautiful, but I wouldn’t wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.