The Known World Quotes
"He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life."
"This was July, and July dirt tasted even more like sweetened metal than the dirt of June or May."
"He went straight ahead, to the farthest edge of the cornfields to a patch of woods that had yielded nothing of value since the day his master bought it from a white man who had gone broke and returned to Ireland."
"He was thirty-five years old and for every moment of those years he had been someone’s slave, a white man’s slave and then another white man’s slave and now, for nearly ten years, the overseer slave for a black master."
"He had paid a white boy to go into the white man’s shop to purchase it for him, because the shop would have no black customers."
"I am imperfect, but I am still clay in your hands, ever walking the way you want me to. Mold me and help me to be perfect in your eyes, O Lord."
"In the history of Manchester County, the end of Sheriff Patterson’s long tenure when he was only thirty-eight would be a small thing—way down on the list of historical events, after the death in 1820 of the virgin Mistress Taylor in her hundred-and-second year and the snowstorm that brought ten inches in late May 1829 and the slave boy Baker and the two white Otis boys who burst spontaneously into flames in front of the dry goods store in 1849."
"Don’t leave your wife in North Carolina, God had said to the father at the end of the dream."
"Augustus and Mildred came to pick up their boy a few days after they made the last payment. They waited on the road that Sunday and about noon Rita, the second mother to Henry, came out with the boy."
"It’s big and little, yes and no, up and down, all at the same time."
"Being black, Henry could not in those days purchase a slave outright in Manchester County."
"You just think any way you want," Augustus said to Henry as the wagon neared home, "and it’ll be fine."
"Where is my milk?" Mary asked God with each of the three children. "Where is my milk?"
"Don’t send me back," Rita said in the darkness as each nail was pried loose and the top of the box was gradually separated from the body of the box and the feeble light little by little began to seep in on her.
"I hear you," Moses said. "I hear you good."
"Master dead," Moses said. "So it is," she said and stuck her head out the door just so and looked up toward the house, as if there might be a sign on the verandah announcing the news.
"I would hate to go from Massa Henry’s place. I would hate all that not knowing again where in the world I was."
"I didn’t sleep well," one man across the lane from Elias said to his next-door neighbor. "Well, I know I sure did," the neighbor said. "I slept like they was payin me to, slept enough for three white women without a care in the world."
"Master dead master dead master be dead," Alice chanted.
"It is just as easy to do good as it is to do bad."
"I’ll make you a comb for every hair on your head."
"I be likin Celeste, Master, and I be likin her more as the day go by."
"I want you happy, Elias. And I want to make Celeste happy. So you get back now and both yall be happy."
"All of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do. No one of us who believes in the law and God does more than that."
"Have you ever been homesick, Mrs. Elston?"
"I did not own my family, and you must not tell people that I did."
"The trick of life is to know when God does care and do all you need to do behind his back."
"A slice of bread is better than nothing."
"I wanted to make sure everything was fine with you. I know caring for Miss Clara can be a mighty chore. You have served her well and she knows that."
"Worry bout rain for your garden, and don’t go any higher on the worry ladder."
"I want you to know I meant what I said about killin Harvey Travis. If it comes to him or the father of my children, I would not hesitate."
"It’s a good day for whatever it is a soul want it to be."
"The South is all he knows, but he can fish for souls up there just as easy as he can down here."
"I have missed all of your company, though I must say your père is a charming and most adequate substitute."
"I sing America. I sing America happiness."
"You done growed," Minerva’s sister was to say years later in Philadelphia.
"God is with me, but that is something I knew long ago. God is everywhere in America, especially here with me."
"The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn."
"He got to them gates and the Lord just opened em right up, said, ‘Massa Henry, I been waitin so long for you. Just come right in.’"
"That’s the sheriff’s Minerva." "That’s Mrs. Skiffington’s Minerva."
"He was a man coming apart at all his seams—bad stomach, bad teeth, a twitch in the left leg before falling to sleep. A twitch in the right to wake him during the night."
"But the words did not matter to Caldonia; she was young, unhappy with the courtship prospects all about her, and so even had he talked all afternoon of planting and harvesting tobacco, it would have been a serenade."
"God had given him a head full of good teeth, but not a one of them was sweet."
"Maybe the boy might be fooled that it was a full bucket, but the girl knew things and she would know he had failed to bring a full bucket."
"I have been given credit when I should not have. And there have been times when I was denied the credit due me. But that is the fate of many a teacher, the good and the bad."
"The only thing we ask is that you not hurt children."
"That was my wife’s doing, bless her name. I told her not to do something like that, but I could never say no to her."
"I’m gonna whip your black hide till God tell me to stop, you hear me?"
"You will stay here until you learn some manners, until you learn you cannot get up and walk about like some free man."
"I remember when you did that and fell off into Mississippi from Alabama."
"I want no trouble. I want not one moment’s trouble."
"He wanted to know how long she would keep it up and found that she could outlast his walking beside her."
"This nigger is on business for his owners, Ramsey and Fern Elston at the Elston Estate. He can be trusted to come back home."
"If you do not do right, I will have you in chains again."
"If there was ocean water right out there, I’d jump in and swim all the way up to Baltimore just so I wouldn’t have to walk on damn Virginia land."
"I give yall the work I done and my foot for free."
"I’m just gonna get all that dirt all over you again tomorrow."
"Nome, I wouldn’t say they be hungry. Marse Henry wouldn’t let no slave be hungry if he could help it."
"I met a dead man layin in Massa lane. Ask that dead man what his name."
"You get the meaning I'm trying to convey to you, Mrs. Townsend."
"Mama’s little biddy baby gon git it all real sweet."
"Please, sir. Maybe three hundred and fifty, and I’ll be crying in my soup tonight about that."
"Wouldn’t know how to do it any other way."
"She lost her child, Moses. Don’t you know that?"
"I ain’t never seen anything wrong with it."
"I don’t want to hear anything like this about yall again."
"It might be the same people grabbed my three that grabbed Augustus."
"There ain’t been no Georgia president of the United States far as I know."
"The body commences to turn to the work the way you bend a tree and make it grow whichever way you got a mind to. It don’t know no better."
"You got a back ache, you got a heart ache, you got a foot ache, I can help you. But I don’t like to go to the mouth."
"I have a right to do what is right, and no nigger can stand and oppose that right."
"How have you been, Calvin?" Priscilla inquired.
"I been good as God keeps me," Alice responded.
You know, Moses," she had said only the day before, "I love a good tablecloth. I would rather have a good tablecloth over a good quilt any day.
"We can't bring John back, but we have right here the reason for this whole mess," Travis said, pointing to Moses.
Afraid of all them horses?" he said. "I'm not afraid of any horses," she said, "or anything like that.
"I will have memorized every word and will be ready for the next letter," Caldonia told Louis.
"I wonder if Moses done ate yet," Celeste would often ponder aloud.