Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.

But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house. [...] A man ain't nothing but a man,' said Baby Suggs. 'But a son? Well now, that's somebody.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.