Unit 2: Part 3 Vocabulary

That night was loaded with omens.

But a goodly part of our experience which we find inexplicable must be like that.

Such a place the Fallen Angels might have built as a spite to Heaven, dry and sharp, desolate and dangerous, and for me filled with foreboding.

It took months of negotiation to come to an understanding with the old man.

When he arrived he repeated his previous preliminary performance.

I am the oldest man in the village. Almost everyone there is my relative and all the children of Río en Medio are my sobrinos and nietos, my descendants.

For black people—including my parents—had learned a long time ago that to stay willingly in a beloved but brutal place is to risk losing the love and being forced to acknowledge only the brutality.

At the moment I saw his resistance I knew I would never be able to live in this country without resisting everything that sought to disinherit me, and I would never be forced away from the land of my birth without a fight.

You know, if you have read his books, that his is a complex and revolutionary philosophy that few people are capable of understanding fully or have the patience to embody in themselves.

They all nodded, each of them picturing this merchant in varying degrees of success and affluence.

Although he never said so, Hana guessed he would be pleased to be rid of her, the spirited younger sister who stirred up his placid life with what he considered radical ideas about life and the role of women.

She spent two miserable days and nights waiting, as the immigrants were questioned by officials, examined for trachoma and tuberculosis, and tested for hookworm. It was a bewildering, degrading beginning, and Hana was sick with anxiety, wondering if she would ever be released.

I memorized the part about the human voice infusing words. It seemed so valid and poetic.

As I ate she began the first of what we later called “my lessons in living.” She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy.

I have tried often to search behind the sophistication of years for the enchantment I so easily found in those gifts.

Americans are becoming more planted in one place, defying the cultural assumption that the frontier offers a better life.

It's just engrained into what Americans think about themselves—it's embedded in our culture.

"People are willing to engage in that kind of disruption rather than be uprooted," he says.