The Undertaker's Assistant

She’d always found children loud and squirmy and, often as not, smelly. But at least they spoke straight. They laughed when they were happy and cried when they were in pain. You never had to second-guess their motives or scrutinize their expressions.

Perchance you disremember for a reason. Perchance you ought let that which is dead stay dead.

No matter how grandly or wretchedly you lived, death, in his time, would find you.

I fought for the preservation of the Union, Miss Jones. Nothing more, nothing less.

She’d thought Mrs. Kinyon did it to punish her, thought the woman believed her suited for naught but domestic drudgery on account of her race and sex. Perhaps instead she’d been trying to help, to teach Effie something truly useful.

That every drop of blood drawn with the lash be paid by another drawn with the sword.

Schopenhauer believed loss of memory stemmed from the inability of one’s intellect to assimilate an event due to opposition from the will.” She thought it best not to add he believed this the root of madness.

Love! What greater culprit was there in the abandonment of reason?

Until that moment, she’d not realized the crushing weight hope had brought to bear on

The men who’d dreamed up these floats had never looked upon the insides of a man. Never seen the heart, lungs, spleen, liver all laid out in the same grand order regardless of race or sex.

To want a seat at the theater, soda shop, or on the streetcar?

Was it so radical to want to walk down the street unmolested? To want to send your children to the same good schools white children attended?

No one to mourn you in death meant no one to hurt you in life.