River Sing Me Home Quotes
"We can confront the injustices of our past as a way to shed light on our present and work toward a more equitable future."
"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole." - Derek Walcott
"For us, loss was the only thing that was certain."
"Everything laid down shallow roots. But what couldn’t go deep went wide, tapping the oceans, tunneling to the islands nearby, where others were also trying and failing to live without memory of yesterday or thought of tomorrow."
"Without roots, things die. Many of us did die, at the hands of the white men or in the heat of the midday sun. The soil ran rich with our blood, and the roots fed on our bodies. It made the roots strong. Shallow, but strong."
"Was this freedom? The empty forest. Her fleeing, sick with dread. Was this what they had hoped for, all along?"
"With the sea spread out in front of her, she felt small in a different way—not small in herself but a small part of everything that surrounded her."
"There was freedom in this new kind of smallness, an exhilarating sense that she was in the world, and not just passing through it at a white man’s pace."
"Trust did not come easily to Rachel, but what choice did she have? There was nowhere left to run."
"She admired Hope’s confidence, but it was in the same way as she admired the grand houses in the center of Bridgetown. Something impressive but alien, even a little frightening."
"Those were the stories that Rachel suspected Mrs. Armstrong did not share with her husband. How could she? He would not be able to fill in the gaps. Fragments of her past would be lost forever. In Rachel, the memory was better preserved."
"Micah, Mercy, Cherry Jane, Thomas Augustus—they were all living now in someone else. She no longer carried their weight alone."
""I have always survived it," he said. "I do not mind feeling small. I do not need reminding that I am Nobody—as are we all."
"A life at sea is not for everyone," he said. "It can make you feel very small. I have seen it drive people mad.""
"Me understand how hard it is to leave behind what you know. But it is time."
"Once they’ve seen you’re willing to have them arrested if they step out of line, they tend to be most obedient. No one knows the value of freedom more than an ex-slave."
"The lie slipped out easily, bonding the three of them more tightly together. Just in case."
"She felt as if she had stepped from solid ground into deep water."
"A thin sliver of moonlight fell between the buildings on each side, like a glowing thread pulling her down an unknown path."
"Because someone helped me when I needed it. And you should not take help if you're not going to give it when the time comes."
"For the rest of the day, they settled back into their old routine, letting pieces of fractured conversations ebb and flow over many hours."
"Her eldest son, the longest gone. She would go to him, she would find him, and they would be whole again, as if the cord had never been cut."
"The reunion with Mary Grace kept playing, over and over, in Rachel’s mind. The way it had felt when her daughter’s skin had pressed against her own again, after all those years—that feeling was still with her, as if the embrace had never ceased."
"He make me say me wife’s name. Susannah. It was our evening ritual, when we make our way back from the fields. We whisper the names of the ones we love like the words of a song. That was the taste of freedom to us, those names on our lips."
"Even the white man’s God know what we know. That one day we gon’ walk through the sea to freedom."
"When a crowd move, it’s like water. You get swept along, but you also the one who push ahead and carry others with you as you go."
"To feel alone, as those men had done? To discount all the other life around her, to discount even the gently flowing water and the fertile earth itself as companions in her journey? That struck her as the height of arrogance."
"She knew what it was to search for something—to be exhausted, bent double by the weight of loss, but somehow still crawling on their knees, hands outstretched, fumbling in the dark to find the pieces of whatever had been shattered."
"Pain, loss, dislocation, a search for home—each one of them knew these, too, in their own way."
"Hope hurts. Her son had managed to express the truth that had governed her old life."
"The work of letting go, of starting afresh, could take a lifetime."
"Rachel had always been confused by the lengths to which white men would go for the sake of possession."
"It was exhilarating. The punishing heat and the sharpness of hunger could not erase the fact that she was free."
"When Mary Grace walked beside her, Rachel was reminded of all the little ways her daughter had changed since Bridgetown. The parts of her that had unfurled, unknotted. The space she took up now. Her solidity. The way her eyes could hold anyone’s gaze, steady, without flinching."
"There was no parted sea. There was no freedom on the other side. Only the promise of six years’ apprenticeship to the cruel man they had met—and, maybe, her daughter."
"It was not completeness that she felt, because her heart bore all the scars of the dead, and the ones left hundreds of miles away. But it was the closest thing to completeness she had ever known. It was acceptance. It was peace."
"This was work that she had done, day after day, month after month, for decades, but she had since tasted something more."
"How come you still running when you free, me don’t know. But they run."
"Me proud. Of what Micah do. He was always the bravest of us all."
"Love was there in the beginning—even before the beginning. Existence was enough."
"Born into the thing for which his father and his namesake had died, for which his grandmother had risked her life, had crossed oceans, had walked hundreds of miles on aching feet. This child could never know bondage. Freedom was his birthright."
"Survival was second to second, surge to surge."
"Time not on the scale of the long, dragging minutes cutting cane in the hot sun. Not even on the scale of the seasons, from harvest to planting and back again. Time on the scale of generations, which could span hundreds of years."
"There." (Referring to the sight of the sea, symbolizing hope and freedom.)