When you grow up with a mother who has to wash dishes and clean hotel rooms, you know the importance of having a job, and you can't be without a job for any length of time, or you will be without anything.

We leave, we run away and don’t realize how much we’ll need to go back home one day. The South is like that. It’s the worst mama in the world and it’s the best mama in the world.

Render your body to them” his father had taught, “but know your soul belongs to God.

Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?

But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don’t go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there.

Priscilla watched her husband as he slowly drifted into sleep, and once he was asleep, she took hold of his hand and put it to her face and smelled all of the outside world that he had brought in with him and then she tried to find sleep herself.

Until I can read a story physically, with the eyes, it doesn’t seem to exist for me.

Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with by their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the slave had already thrown the first load of money down, as William Robbins once told Skiffington.

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors – black and white – because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

I’m fascinated by the awful, awful things that human beings do to each other.