Isabel Chains Quotes

I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously . . . And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence . . . It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages . . .

If an entire nation could seek its freedom, why not a girl?

I thought of all the ancestors waiting at the water's edge for their stolen children to come home. Waiting and waiting and waiting . . .

How could men who liked cats be bad?

Isabel's relations with her mother and sister were like those knots you get in necklaces. You try to tease them out and end up putting the chain back in the jewelry box.

I've become my own solution. I believe in me now.

The Navy official, James K. Paulding, said: “When they [the slaveholders] permit such flagrant and indecent outrages upon humanity as that I have described; when they sanction a villain, in thus marching half naked women and men, loaded with chains, without being charged with a crime but that of being black, from one section of the United States to another, hundreds of miles in the face of day, they disgrace themselves, and the country to which they belong.” —

Now she glanced at the piles of books and papers on her desk. There are no chains, she thought, except those we create for ourselves. That, of course, was not entirely true: there were plenty of chains, real or imaginary, that people created for others--or that desks created, she thought...

Isabel’s relations with her mother and sister were like those knots you get in necklaces. You try to tease them out and end up putting the chain back in the jewelry box.

Both exiled their indigenous peoples—the Adivasi in India, the Native Americans in the United States—to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society. Both countries enacted a fretwork of laws to chain the lowliest group—Dalits in India and African-Americans in the United States—to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there.

In the United States, from slavery well into the twentieth century, doctors used African-Americans as a supply chain for experimentation, as subjects deprived of either consent or anesthesia. Scientists injected plutonium into them, purposely let diseases like syphilis go untreated to observe the effects, perfected the typhoid vaccine on their bodies, and subjected them to whatever agonizing experiments came to the doctors’ minds.

It's easier now. There's a sense of relief. And while I still suffer from my demons, I am not overcome by them. I am not chained by them. I just know how to deal with them. And that is the greatest satisfaction.

In earlier times, even those who owned no slaves, wrote the white southern author W. J. Cash, clung to the “dear treasure of his superiority as a white man, which had been conferred on him by slavery; and so was determined to keep the black man in chains.

Making enslaved people perform on command also reinforced their subjugation. They were made to sing despite their exhaustion or the agonies from a recent flogging or risk further punishment. Forced good cheer became a weapon of submission to assuage the guilt of the dominant caste and further humiliate the enslaved. If they were in chains and happy, how could anyone say that they were being mistreated?

The tension between Patriot and Loyalist New Yorkers, the Tea Water Pump, the taking of lead from houses, the pulling down of King George’s statue, the chaos surrounding the British invasion of the city, the fire, prisoners of war, the Queen’s Birthday Ball: all of these are historical facts. I wove the fictional characters of Isabel and Curzon into the history to give readers a sense of what life might have been like in those days.