Quotes

~" My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and i promise to lie quietly in the dark--weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing blood once more" (pg. 3).

~" Other signs need more time to understand. Often there are too many signs, or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to recall, yet I know I am missing much..." (pg. 4).

~"Any social ease between gentry and laborers, forged before and during that rebellion, crumbled beneath a hammer wielded in the interests of the gentry's profits. In Jacob Vaark's view, these were lawless laws encouraging cruelty in exchange for common cause, if not common virtue." (pg. 12).

~" Even with the relative safety of his kin, solitary traveling requiered prudence." (pg. 13)

~ " Whateve it was. he couldn't stay there surronded by passel of slaves whose silence made him imagine an avalanche seen from a great distance. No sound, just the knowledge of a roar he could not hear." (pg. 26)

~ "D'Ortega lifted an eyebrow, just one, as though on its curved an empire rested." (pg. 27)

~ " Where else but in this disorganized world would such an encounter be possible? Where else could ank tremble before courage?" (pg. 29)

~"Lina twitchy as fresh-hooked salmon waits with me in the village". (pg. 44)

~"She gives off a bad feeling so I keep my thoughts on the goatherd's hat." (pg. 45)

~" Then west to you. I am hurrying to gain ground before all light is over. The land slopes sharply and I have no way to go but down as well. Hard as I try I lose the road." (pg. 48)

~" Fire. How quick. How purposefully it ate what had been built whyat had been life. Cleansing somehow and scandalous in beauty." (pg. 57)

~" Sir and Mistress believed they could have honest free-thinking lives, yet without heirs, all their work meant less than a swallow's nest. Their drift away from others prodiced a slefish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the oconsolation of a clan." (pg. 68)

~" When Lina tried to enlighten her, saying, 'You are one leaf on his tree,' Florens shook her head, closed her eyes and replied, 'No. I am his tree.' A sea change that Lina could only hope was not final." (pg. 71)

~"Lina says there are some spirits who look after warriors and hunters and there are othes who guard virgins and mothers. I am none of these. Reverend Father says communion is the best hope, prayer the next." (pg. 80)

~" There was nothing in the world to prepare her for a life of water, on water, about water; sickened by it and desperate for it. Mesmerized and bored by the loof of, it especially at midday when the women were allowed another hour on deck." (pg. 85)

~"She did not know what a Fifth Monarchist was, then or now, but it was clear in her household that execution was festivity as exciting as a king's parade." (pg. 88)

~" They had removd themselves from a larger sect in order to practice a purer form of their Separatist religion, one truer and more acceptable to God. Among them she was deliberately soft-spoken." (pg. 91)

~" Weak as her faith was, there was no excuse for not protecting the soul of an infant from eternal perdition." (pg. 92)

~" Her own death was what she could be concentrating on. She could hear its hooves clacking on the rook, could see the cloaked figure on horseback." (pg. 92)

~" Rebekka learned otherwise soon enough, soon as they were seperated from males and the better-classed women and led to a dark space below next to the animal stalls." (pg. 95)

~" Wretched as was the space they crouched in, it was nevertheless blank where a past did not haunt nor a future beckon." (pg. 100)

~" Then as she stood in molten sunlight, pulling the corners of her apron together, the comfortable sounds of the farm would drop." (pg. 109)

~" As she knew from their visits, whatever life threw up, whatever obstacles they faced, they anipulated the circumstances to their advantage and trusted their own imagination." (pg. 114)

~" Naked under examination I watch for what is in their eyes. [...] The women look away fro my eyes the way you say I am to do with the bears so they will not come close to love and play." (pg. 133)

Themes Key:

Light green- Struggle with religion

Light pink- Struggle with race

Orange-Struggle with social status

Blue-Struggle with gender equality

Gray- Abandonment issues

~" It is clear it seems whether or no I am the Black Man's minion. I step into the room and the little girl screams and flails her arms. Te women surround her and rush out." (pg. 133)

~" The man's voice syas this is preliminary yet witnesses are several. Widow interrupts him saying her daughter's eye is askew as God made it and it has no specail powers. And look, she says, look at her wounds. God's son bleeds. We bleed. Demons never." (pg. 130)

~" I walk alone exceot for the eyes that joinme on my journey. Eyes that do not recognize me, eyes that examin me for a tail, an extra teat. Wondering eyes that stare and decide if my navel is in the right pace if my knees bend backward like the forelegs of a dog. They want to see if my tongue is split like a snake's or if my teeth are filing to points to chew them up. To know if I can spring out of the darkness and bite." (pg. 135)

~" Is that what my mother know? Why she chooses me to live without? Not the outside dark we share, a minha mae and me, but the inside one we don't. Is this dying mine alone?" (pg. 135)

~" That was some consolation, but it took years for Sorrow's steady thoughts of her baby breathing water under Lina's palm to recede." (pg. 145)

~" Years later, when the blacksmith came, the weather of the place changed. Forever. [...] Lina dreading; Mistress humming with contentment; Sir in high spirits. FLorens, of course,was the most distarcted." (pg. 147)

~" He seemed complete, unaware of his effect. Was he the danger Lina saw in him or was her fear mere jealousy? Was he Sir's perfect building partner or a curse on Florens, altering her behavior from open to furtive?" (pg. 147-48)

~" Bit by bit, under the smithy's care and Florens' nursing, the boils shriveled, the welts disappeared and her strenght returned. Now their judgment was clear: the blacksmith was a savior." (pg. 151)

~" There had always been tangles strings among them. Now they were cut. Each woman embargoed herself;spun her own web of thoughts unavilable to anyone else. It was as though, with or without Florens, they were falling away from one another." (pg. 158)

~" She had looked into her daughter's eyes; saw in them the gray glisten of a winter sea while a ship sailed by-the-lee. ' I am your mother,' she said. ' My name is Complete.' " (pg.158)

~" He is silent but the hate in his eyes is loud." (pg. 162)

~" I notice I am at the edge of a lake. [...] I make me go nearer, lean over, clutching the grass for balance. Grass is glossy, long and wet. Right away I take fright when I see my face is not there. Where my face should be is nothing." (pg. 162)

~" I am making me quiet but I am loose inside not knowing how to be." (pg. 163)

~" Why do you knock me away without certainty of what is true? You see the boy down and believe bad about me without question. You are correct but why no question of it?" (pg. 165)

~" She declined, not because she did not trust the; she did, but out of a need to trust herself" (pg. 171)

~" At night in his hammock, trapped in wide, animated darkness, he braced himslef against the living and the dead. The glittering eyes of an elk could easily be a demon, just as the howls of tortured souls might be the call of happy wolves. The dread of those solitary might gripped his days." (pg. 175)

~" Although he was still rankled by the status of a free African American versus himself, there was nothing he could do about it. No law exsisted to defend indentured labor against them." (pg. 177)

~" I have no shoes. I have no kicking heart no home no tomorrow. I walk the day. I walk the night. The feathers close. For now." (pg. 185)

~" Each time she returns from the meetinghouse her eyes are nowhere and have no inside. Like the eyes of the women who examine me behind the closet door, Mistress' eyes only look out and what she is seeing is not to her liking. Her dress is dark and quiet. She prays much." (pg. 186)

You say you see slaves freer than free men. One is a lion in the skin of an ass. The other is an ass in the skin of a lion. That it is the withering inside that enslaves and opens the door for what is wild" (pg. 187)

~" If you never read this, no one will. These careful words closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves." (pg. 188)

~" Reverand Father was full of kindness and bravery and said it was what God wanted no matter if they fined him, imprisoned him or hunted him down with gunfire for it as they did other priests who taught we to read. He believed we woud love God more if we knew the letters to read by. I don't know that.. What I know is there is magic in learning." (pg. 191)

~" There is no protection. To be female in this pace is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below." (pg. 191)

~" There we see men we believe are ill or dead. We soon learn they are neither. Their skin was confusing. The men guarding we and selling we are black." (p. 192)

~" [The children] had stopped weeping long ago. Now eyes wide, they tries to please, to show their ability and therfore their living worth. How unlikely their survival. How likely another herd will come to destroy them. A herd of men of heaped teeth fingering the hasps of whips. Men flushed red with cravings." (pg. 194)

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Referring to the constant flow of slaves along the beginning slave trade