Unit 3: Selection Vocabulary 1

When I pulled into my mother’s rocky driveway and cut my car off, another; and then a deep breath to steady myself and gain my bearings.

White Mississippi’s steadfast belief in this idea was not only readily apparent but also burned into the national consciousness.

I carry every slur, every slight, every violent malign within me; they have become a part of me, accreted in me year after year to settle in me and express themselves in my body: vascular inflammation, migraine headaches, diabetes, giving birth to both of my children prematurely.

Here is my local bookseller, a white middle-aged man, arranging a celebratory birthday dinner for my sister and hosting it even as he is convalescing from an illness, and doing it all with a quiet, gentle smile.

I like to imagine that one day, I will build a home of cement, a home built to weather the elements, in a clearing in a piney Southern wood, riven with oak and dogwood.

For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits?

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us.

And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin!

To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it.

Had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.

The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

...your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

When Cudjo goes down into his back-field or away from home he locks his gate with an ingenious wooden peg of African invention.

After a minute or two he remembered me and said contritely, “Excuse me, You didn’t do nothin’ to me. Cudjo feel so lonely, he can’t help he cry sometime. Whut you want wid me?”

Seeing the anguish in his face, I regretted that I had come to worry this captive in a strange land.

He don’t live in de compound wid us.

I was afraid that Cudjo might go off on a tangent, so I cut in with, “But Kossula, I want to hear about you and how you lived in Africa.”