Prentice Alvin Quotes
"Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table."
"Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk."
"The disappointments might have embittered a man of weaker faith. But Cavil Planter was a godly, upright man, and whenever he had the faintest thought that God might have treated him badly, he stopped whatever he was doing and pulled the small psaltery from his pocket and whispered aloud the words of the wise man."
"All she knew was that no heartfire ever was in such pain as the soul of a Black who lived in the thin dark shadow of the lash."
"Other folks didn't have her problem. They could talk and tell the truth. But Peggy couldn't tell the truth. She knew these folks too well."
"Was Eve's sin so terrible, that God should curse all women with that mighty curse? You will groan and bear children, said Almighty Merciful God. You will be eager for your husband, and he will rule over you."
"It's an evil thing God did to women, thought Peggy, to make us hanker after husband and children till it leads us to a life of sacrifice and nursery and grief."
"I don't want to know, she said. I don't want to know all the roads of the future. Other girls can dream of love, the joys of marriage, of being mothers to strong healthy babes; but all my dreams have dying in them, too, and pain, and fear, because my dreams are true dreams, I know more than a body can know and still have any hope inside her soul."
"She saw it all, and said nothing. Kept her mouth shut. Talked to no one. Cause she wasn't going to lie."
"Peggy could see so much in other people's heartfires that she hardly was acquainted with her own."
"You're not like Po Doggly, Papa, who doesn't think much of Blacks but hates seeing any wild thing cooped up. He does this, helping slaves make their way to Canada, cause he's just got that need in him to set them free."
"Your pretty little secret who smiled at you like heartbreak in person and you could've said no but you didn't, you said yes oh yes."
"It's your knack for making folks feel loved. They come to your inn and they feel right at home."
"I looked for that woman, looked for her heartfire, far and wide I searched for her, and I found her."
"But most sad people just kept right on being sad, hanging onto misery like the last keg of water in a drought."
"A rich man's slave is still a slave, ain't he?"
"She knew the price and now she can't help but pay."
"I reckon she just figures it's better to die free than live a slave."
"Everybody's going to think somebody else has been plowing with Mr. Berry's heifer."
"Mama, the Berrys are just about the best Christians in Hatrack River. They have to be, to keep forgiving the way White folks treat them and their children."
"But she knew right away that she was the first woman ever to touch this man upon the face since his mama all those many years ago."
"What a terrible gift it was, to be a torch, to know all these things a-coming, and have so little power to change them."
"Your mama died to bring you here– you make the best of it, and you'll be something, right enough."
"Somewhere there's a thread that if I just lay hold on it, it'll lead me to happiness."
"But better that unknown future than one I knew all along I'd hate, and then did nothing to avoid."
"I hope you'll think that I was worth dying for."
"All could vote and all could speak and no one could say, I'm a better man than you."
"I've got a work to do in my life and I don't have the first spark of an idea how to get ready for it."
"Words of prophecy was what turned letters bright like that."
"He wasn't no philosopher. He was a boy of eleven."
"That's how fathers feel about their children when they're gone."
"Most folks would've thought right off about all the secrets they hoped she wouldn't guess."
"If I'm torch enough to know your secret, I'm torch enough to know there was some good in it as well as sin."
"I had hoped that time would ease the shame of it, and he'd remember it now with joy. Like one of the ancient faded tapestries in England, whose colors are no longer bright, but whose image is the very shadow of beauty itself."
"All these years I've never spoken to a mortal soul of this. I've poured out my heart only to the Lord, and he's forgiven me; yet I find it somehow exhilarating to speak of this to someone whose face I can see with my eyes, and not just my imagination."
"The way he loved me taught me that perhaps– no, not perhaps– that I was worth loving."
"I didn't like the life I saw for myself back in Hatrack. I wanted to– Escape? Somewhat like that, I reckon, but not exactly."
"There is no single prize to be won, which, if one woman attains it, must remain out of reach for all the others."
"The art of beauty is the art of truth. Other women pretend to be someone else; you will be your loveliest self, with the same natural exuberant grace as a bounding deer or a circling hawk."
"I used to hear tell about the Hatrack River torch, afore I ever come here. How come I never seen her? She's gone, that's why," said Makepeace. "Left three years ago. Just run off."
"I can't be sure, not being a doodlebug," said Hank, as modest as he could manage, "but I'd say you won't have to dig ten feet till you strike water here. It's fresh and lively as I ever seen."
"What was I doing at this foolish ball, when Alvin needed me? If I had been paying proper attention, I would have seen this coming, would have found some way to help him."
"The White man was the Unmaker's tool in this forest land, Alvin knew that, better even than water at tearing things down."
"Sometimes it burned Alvin up inside, and he got a hankering to do something spetackler to show Makepeace Smith that his prentice wasn't just a boy who didn't know he was being cheated."
"I'm willing, thought Alvin. I got the power in me, when I can figure how to use it straight, and I got the desire to be whatever it is I'm meant to be, but somebody's got to teach me."
"The Prophet Lolla-Wossiky showed him a vision of the Crystal City only a week before the massacre at Tippy-Canoe. Alvin knew that someday in the future it was up to him to build them towers of ice and light. That was his destiny, not to be a country fixit man."
"What good would freedom do? He had to learn first how to be a Maker, or it wouldn't make no difference if he went or stayed."
"But all the time in the back of his brain he recollected what he really was. A Maker. Whatever that is, I'm it, which is why the Unmaker tried to kill me before I was born and in a hundred accidental and almost-murders in my childhood back in Vigor Church."
"He looked around in the ruddy evening light, thinking where to start looking for a diggable spot. He heard Arthur Stuart pulling at the meadow grass, and the sound of birds having a church choir practice, they were so loud tonight."
"As long as he was bound to Makepeace Smith's service, he had to keep his real knack secret."
"It was enough to send a thrill of fear right through him, make him shiver in the warm spring air."
"You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can't call back the futures that your bad decisions lost."
"Everybody has his talent, everybody has his gift from God, and we go about sharing gifts with each other, that's the way of the world, the best way."
"How can I be a Maker if I can't even guess how I do what I do?"
"Society has decreed that a Black child will grow up to be a Black man, and a Black man, like ancient Adam, will earn his bread by the sweat of his body, not by the labors of his mind."
"Arthur Stuart was the only family she had left in the world, the only person she loved who didn't lie to her or fool her or do things behind her back."
"The whole idea of public schools is a little strange. The way they do schools in the Crown Colonies, it's all the people with titles and money who get to attend, so that the poor have no chance to learn or rise."
"If you pass from my world into another one, I can no longer teach you anything."
"Because some men are great enough that they can love a whole woman, and not just a part of her."
"All the high-toned folks are down in the Crown Colonies with His Majesty, the other Arthur Stuart. The long-haired White king, as opposed to her own short-haired Black boy Arthur."
"You're telling me who loved who? Well let me tell you, Horace Guester, all your love for Little Peggy didn't keep her here, did it? But my love for Arthur Stuart is going to get him an education, do you understand me? And when it's all said and done, Horace Guester, we'll just see who does better at loving their children!"
"Then he pushed it closed, as gentle as if he was tucking a baby into bed."
"The places that she loved were like holy ground to her old dad."
"He was giving in. Was that the way of marriage, then? A man either had to be willing to hit his wife, like Makepeace Smith, or he'd be bossed around like poor Horace Guester."
"They saw a man with no coat on, just in his shirt-sleeves, stained and wet from his labor."
"I may be Prentice Alvin, and not a man yet afore the law, but no woman yells me to shame."
"I reckon as you'd have to be a deaf mute not to hear that last bit."
"A boy like you, you do well enough out here where they don't know better, but you'd never make a go of it there, where a smith has to be a man."
"Your way with horses, sure, I knew about that. And what you done finding that well, sense like a doodlebug, I could see that, too."
"I'll keep your secret," said Makepeace. "I won't tell a soul."
"The Savior said the laborer is worthy of his hire."
"Well why in hell did you say that this one and this one and this one couldn't go to school with this one and this one and this one?"
"You people, you're all the same rare meat under the skin. But I tell you, I don't like your flavor. I'm going to toss your beefsteaks to the dogs."
"Teach me. That's what I want from you, Lady, to help me find my way to the root of the world or the root of myself or the throne of God or the Unmaker's heart, wherever the secret of Making lies."
"Maybe you'd best speak to her like a lady," said Alvin. "Or perhaps not speak to her at all."
"I don't need protection, young man," she said. "Just go along, please."
"Knives," said Alvin, with all the contempt he could muster. "So you're afraid to face a blacksmith with bare hands?"
"Obviously there are no rules when you speak, either, or you'd know that the word ain't is a sure sign of ignorance and stupidity."
"You're not so much," Alvin said, "and you know it, or you wouldn't have a knife hid in your boot."
"Wash?" she asked. "And when you do, will your brutality also wash away?"
"If I don't teach, you get no salary," said the sheriff. "You speak hastily, Mr. Wiseman," said Miss Larner. "I believe the lawyers present will inform you that the school board's letters constitute a contract, of which you are in breach, and that I would therefore be entitled to collect, not just a month's salary, but the entire year's."
"It just ain't decent!" cried the sheriff. "Aren't." "Isn't."
"I reckon we get along well enough most of the time, boys," said the portmaster. "But today you just don't seem to know when you been beat fair and square."
"And what might he need from me, Goody Guester?" "Book-learning." "That's what I've come to provide to all the children in Hatrack River, Goody Guester." "Not Arthur Stuart. Not if those pin-headed cowards on the school board have their way–" "Why should they exclude your son? Is he over-age, perhaps?" "He's the right age, Miss Larner. What he ain't is the right color." "Half-Black, surely," offered the teacher.
"I am merely a human being who refuses to deny the humanity of others, unless their own acts prove them unworthy of that noble kinship."
"You're mean as a cat with a burr in its behind."
"No station in life is above any other, if it's occupied by someone with a good heart."
"Perhaps you don't desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I daresay poetry will do you far more good."
"I couldn't guarantee you happiness anyway, and this way at least I also have a chance of it myself."
"Your knack is your destiny. You'll never know joy except through following the path laid out before you by what is inside you."
"It wasn't gratitude she wanted. It was freedom. It was a lightening of her burden."
"I have learned many graces... I am not who I had been."
"No, wanted to kill. Murder that baby she was carrying."
"Why, if they had their way and freed all the slaves at once, it would accomplish the devil's purpose, not God's, for without slavery the Blacks have no hope of rising out of their savagery."
"Sometimes I wish I never told you what I do."
"It is what you can see that remains impossible to understand."
"The world you actually see is nothing more than an example, a special case."
"It can only be discovered in the imagination, which is precisely the aspect of your mind that is most neglected."
"If God dreamed up men like White Murderer Harrison then God wasn't too good."
"God worked pretty much the way Alvin did– told the rocks of the earth and the fire of the sun and stuff like that, told it all how it was supposed to be and then let it be that way."