Moses The Black Quotes

I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word home means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bedroom when you were eight. See, I want to know the first time you felt the weight of hate, and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms or would leave your snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name, and if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you to tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. Tell me, knowing I often picture Gandhi at ten years old beating up little boys at school. If you were walking by a chemical plant where smokestacks were filling the sky with dark black clouds would you holler “Poison! Poison! Poison!” really loud or would you whisper “That cloud looks like a fish, and that cloud looks like a fairy!” Do you believe that Mary was really a virgin? Do you believe that Moses really parted the sea? And if you don’t believe in miracles, tell me — how would you explain the miracle of my life to me? See, I wanna know if you believe in any god or if you believe in many gods or better yet what gods believe in you. And for all the times that you’ve knelt before the temple of yourself, have the prayers you asked come true? And if they didn’t, did you feel denied? And if you felt denied, denied by who? I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling good. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling bad. I wanna know the first person who taught you your beauty could ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass. If you ever reach enlightenment will you remember how to laugh? Have you ever been a song? Would you think less of me if I told you I’ve lived my entire life a little off-key? And I’m not nearly as smart as my poetry I just plagiarize the thoughts of the people around me who have learned the wisdom of silence. Do you believe that concrete perpetuates violence? And if you do — I want you to tell me of a meadow where my skateboard will soar. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving, and if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes from other people’s wounds, and if you dream sometimes that this life is just a balloon — that if you wanted to, you could pop, but you never would ‘cause you’d never want it to stop. If a tree fell in the forest and you were the only one there to hear — if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound, would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist, or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness? And lastly, let me ask you this: If you and I went for a walk and the entire walk, we didn’t talk — do you think eventually, we’d… kiss? No, wait. That’s asking too much — after all, this is only our first date.

Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.

You fast, but Satan does not eat. You labor fervently, but Satan never sleeps. The only dimension with which you can outperform Satan is by acquiring humility, for Satan has no humility.

It never occurred to him that now he was looking at his master, at the one person in all the world who held his fate right between her palms - me, in patched hand-me-downs and untrimmed hair and idiot smile - and that my hatred for him is pure and black and unforgiving. And that I don't believe in God, but if I did, if I did, it would be the God of Moses, angry and demanding and OUT FOR REVENGE...

I have a license,” says a voice behind us. I turn to find 17C scrolling through pictures on his camera, standing in the front yard like a deep-rooted tree, like he’s been there for years. Somehow, that black eye only makes him more desirable. “And you are . . . ?” asks Moses. A) Perfect B) The god of Devastating Attractiveness C) A flawless specimen, created in a lab by mad scientists in an effort to toy with the heart of Mary Iris Malone D) All of the above I circle D. Final effing answer.

The funny thing is, I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like, `What were these people smoking back then?’ The bottom line is I don’t believe in a bloke called God in a white suit who sits on a fluffy cloud any more than I believe in a bloke called the Devil with a three-pronged fork and a couple of horns. But I believe that there’s day, there’s night, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s black, there’s white. If there is a God, it’s nature. If there’s a Devil, it’s nature.

If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful—and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding—than any creation or “end of days” story. If you read Hawking on the “event horizon,” that theoretical lip of the “black hole” over which one could in theory plunge and see the past and the future (except that one would, regrettably and by definition, not have enough “time”), I shall be surprised if you can still go on gaping at Moses and his unimpressive “burning bush.

He saw that there was something alive in it, and went near enough to read a sign that said, TWO DEADLY ENEMIES. HAVE A LOOK FREE. There was a black bear about four feet long and very thin, resting on the floor of the cage; his back was spotted with bird lime that had been shot down on him by a small chicken hawk sitting on a perch in the upper part of the same apartment. Mose of the hawk's tail was gone; the bear only had one eye.

Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?

He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.

Freedom, she wrote in Moses, Man of the Mountain, “was something internal…. The man himself must make his own emancipation.” And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the “arrogance” of whites assuming that “black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.” Her strategy was not calculated to please.

Hurston’s mythic realism, lush and dense within a lyrical black idiom, seemed politically retrograde to the proponents of a social or critical realism.

Betty was a great shark of a woman. Men died in her wake.

YO MAMA SO OLD... Yo mama so old the back of her head looks like a raisin. Yo mama so old her social security number is 1. Yo mama so old when she was a child rainbows were still in black and white. Yo mama so old when she was in school there was no history class. Yo mama so old she has a picture of Moses in her yearbook. Yo mama so old she was a crossing guard when Moses parted the red sea. Yo mama so old she was a waitress at the Last Supper. Yo mama so old she has an autographed bible. Yo mama so old she knew Mr. Clean when he had an afro. Yo mama so old she knew Gandalf before he had a beard.

They believed in Black Power. They’d give it a trial anyway. Everything else had failed. What did they have to lose? And they might win. Who knew? The whale swallowed Jonah. Moses split the Red Sea. Christ rose from the dead. Lincoln freed the slaves. Hitler killed six million Jews. The Africans had got to rule – in some parts of Africa, anyway. The Americans and the Russians have shot the moon. Some joker has made a plastic heart. Anything is possible.

It is remarkable that circumcision, which is invariably practiced by thE Mahometans, and forms a distinguishing rite of their faith, to which all proselytes must conform, is neither mentioned in the Koran nor the Sonna. It seems to have been a general usage in Arabia, tacitly adopted from the Jews, and is even said to have been prevalent throughout the East before the time of Moses. It is said that the Koran forbids the making likenesses of any living thing, which has prevented the introduction of portrait-painting among Mahometans. The passage of the Koran, however, which is thought to contain the prohibition, seems merely an echo of the second commandment, held sacred by Jews and Christians, not to form images or pictures for worship. One of Mahomet's standards was a black eagle. Among the most distinguished Moslem ornaments of the Alhambra at Granada is a fountain supported by lions carved of stone, and some Moslem monarchs have had their effigies stamped on their coins.

Perhaps as the Patois and Somali languages were poured into the Black-British pot our cultures would grow in love for one another, but there was an equal chance they would mix like oil and water and refuse to be branded by the disingenuous stamp of race.

With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.

Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gone With the Wind in 1937. She was 37 years old at the time. Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1948 at the age of 49. Ruth Gordon picked up her first Oscar in 1968 for Rosemary’s Baby. She was 72 years old. Billie Jean King took the battle of women’s worth to a tennis court in Houston’s Astrodome to outplay Bobby Riggs. She was 31 years of age. Grandma Moses began a painting career at the age of 76. Anne Morrow Lindbergh followed in the shadow of her husband until she began to question the meaning of existence for individual women. She published her thoughts in Gift from the Sea in 1955, at 49. Shirley Temple Black was Ambassador to Ghana at the age of 47. Golda Meir in 1969 was elected prime minister of Israel. She had just turned 71. This summer Barbara Jordan was given official duties as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. She is 40 years old. You can tell yourself these people started out as exceptional. You can tell yourself they had influence before they started. You can tell yourself the conditions under which they achieved were different from yours. Or you can be like a woman I knew who sat at her kitchen window year after year and watched everyone else do it and then said to herself, “It’s my turn.” I was 37 years old at the time.

Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first to resist the draft. SNCC’s Bob Moses joined historian Staughton Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint by angry super-patriots.

The mind is the master of the physical world. The physical isn’t observed by the mind—it’s actually dependent on the mind. It’s more correct to say that the physical world is also mind. Remove or transform the mind, and the physical world has no independent existence. When you know the truth about reality, you don’t have to fear anything in the physical world.

Ever since black people came to this country we have needed a Moses. There has always been so much water that needs parting. It seems like all black children, from the time we are born, come into the world in the midst of a rushing current that threatens to swallow us whole if we don't heed the many, many warnings we are told to heed. We come into the world as alchemists of the water, bending it, willing it to bear us safe passage and cleanse us along the way, to teach us to move with joy and purpose and to never, ever stop flowing forward into something grand waiting at the other end of the delta. We're a people forever in exodus. Before Moses there was Abraham, and ever since black people came to this country we have needed an Abraham. We have always been sending each other away -- for our own good, don't you know it -- and calling each other back, finding kinship where a well springs from tears. We are masters of the art of sacrifice; no one is more skilled at laying their greatest beloveds on the altar and feeling certainty even as we feel sorrow. And when we see the ram, we know how to act fast, and prosper, even as the stone knife warms in our hands.

The difference between the dark magic of the Egyptian magicians and Elymas on the one hand, and Moses and Paul on the other was not what they were doing, but the source of their power. Indeed, what distinguishes sorcery, witchcraft, and black magic from godly miracles, signs, and “white magic” is the source of power (God or demons) and the purpose of the power (worshiping the true God and serving people, or worshiping idols and dominating people).

Hurston moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly, just as she does in Their Eyes to chart Janie’s coming to consciousness. It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “double-consciousness” for the hyphenated African-American.

It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker’s depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of “racial health”—a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.” In a tradition in which male authors have ardently denied black literary paternity, this is a major development, one that heralds the refinement of our notion of tradition: Zora and her daughters are a tradition-within-the-tradition, a black woman’s voice.

After Hurston and her choice of style for the black novel were silenced for nearly three decades, what we have witnessed since is clearly a marvelous instance of the return of the repressed. For Zora Neale Hurston has been “rediscovered” in a manner unprecedented in the black tradition: several black women writers, among whom are some of the most accomplished writers in America today, have openly turned to her works as sources of narrative strategies, to be repeated, imitated, and revised, in acts of textual bonding. Responding to Wright’s critique, Hurston claimed that she had wanted at long last to write a black novel, and “not a treatise on sociology.

This is an ancient text that corrects an even more ancient text. And now we read this ancient text in our contemporary moment of deciding. Ours is a time of scattering in fear. We are so fearful that we want to fence the world in order to keep all the others out: –Some of the church still wants to fence out women. –We build fences to keep out immigrants (or Palestinians). –The church in many places fences out gays. –The old issue of race is still powerful for fencing. We have so many requirements that are as old as Moses. But here is only one requirement. It is Sabbath, work stoppage, an ordinance everyone can honor—gay or straight, woman or man, Black or White, “American” or Hispanic—anybody can keep it and be gathered to the meeting of all of God’s people.

the foot of the downhill Eighties lay the Hudson, as dense as mercury. On the points of radio towers in New Jersey red lights like small hearts beat or tingled. In midstreet, on the benches, old people: on faces, on heads, the strong marks of decay: the big legs of women and blotted eyes of men, sunken mouths and inky nostrils. It was the normal hour for bats swooping raggedly (Ludeyville), or pieces of paper (New York) to remind Herzog of bats. An escaped balloon was fleeing like a sperm, black and quick into the orange dust of the west. He crossed the street, making a detour to avoid a fog of grilled chicken and sausage. The crowd was traipsing over the broad sidewalk. Moses took a keen interest in the uptown public, its theatrical spirit, its performers—the transvestite homosexuals painted with great originality, the wigged women, the lesbians looking so male you had to wait for them to pass and see them from behind to determine their true sex, hair dyes of every shade.

You’re back,” I said, refusing to embarrass myself further by getting angry. “I took Tag home. He had big plans to train for his next fight old school, like Rocky, but discovered that it’s a little more appealing in the movies. Plus, I don’t do a very good Apollo Creed.” “Tag’s a fighter?” “Yeah. Mixed martial arts stuff. He’s pretty good.” “Huh.” I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know anything about the sport. “Didn’t Apollo Creed die in one of the movies?” “Yeah. The black guy always dies at the hands of the white man.” I rolled my eyes, and he grinned, making me grin with him before I remembered that I was embarrassed and ticked off that he had kissed me and left town. It felt a little too much like the past. The grin slipped from my face and I turned away, busying myself shaking out the saddle blankets. “So why did you come back?” I kept my eyes averted. He was quiet for a minute, and I bit my lips so I wouldn’t start to babble into the awkward silence. “The house needs more work,” he replied at last. “And I’m thinking of changing my name.” My head shot up, and I met his smirk with confusion. “Huh?” “I heard there was this new law in Georgia. Nobody named Moses can even visit. So I’m thinking a name change is in order.” I just shook my head and laughed, both embarrassed and pleased at his underlying meaning. “Shut up, Apollo,” I said, and it was his turn to laugh.

In a therapy session, the only labels the horses get are the ones the client gives them.” “So you wouldn’t want me to notice that the Palomino horse, the one with the white mane and the tan body, looks like you and that she’s always making a nuisance of herself?” “Sackett?” I was outraged on Sackett’s behalf more than my own. “Sackett isn’t annoying! And Sackett’s a he, which just proves my point about pre-conceived ideas. If you knew he was a he and not a she, you wouldn’t be able to label him as Georgia and say mean things. Sackett is wise! Whenever things get really deep, you can always count on Sackett being right in the thick of things.” I heard the affront in my voice and I glowered at Moses for a moment before launching my own attack. “And Lucky is just like you!” I said. Moses just stared at me blandly, but I could tell he was enjoying himself. “Because he’s black?” “No, stupid. Because he’s in love with me, and he tries to pretend every day like he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me,” I shot back. Moses choked, and I punched him hard in the stomach, making him gasp and grab for my hands. “So you want the clients to not pay any attention to the color of the horse. That’s not even human nature, you know.” Moses pinned my hands over my head and stared down into my flushed face. When he could see I wasn’t going to continue punching he relaxed his hold, but he looked back toward the horses and continued talking.

She wondered if he was a neighbor, started to smile and introduce herself when his deep voice cut through the cool morning air. “All right, what the hell is going on?” Ignoring the anger in his voice, Charity set her hammer on top of the dresser and climbed down from the porch. “Good morning. I’m Charity Sinclair. I’m the new--” “I don’t care who you are, lady, I want to know what you’re doing on this property.” She fixed a smile on her face, though it took a good bit of effort. “I’m here because I’m the owner. I bought the Lily Rose from a man named Moses Flanagan.” He narrowed those striking blue eyes at her. “Bullshit. Old man Flanagan may not live here anymore but he’d die before he’d sell the Lily Rose. I don’t know who you think you’re kidding, sweetheart, but if you’re planning to squat on his property you can forget it.” It was getting harder by the moment to hang on to her temper. “You’re wrong, Mr…?” He made no effort to answer, just continued to glare down the length of his nicely shaped nose. “Mr. Flanagan decided to move in with his son in Calgary. He listed the property for sale several weeks ago with Smith Real Estate in Dawson. I’m the person who bought it.” His features looked even harder than they had before. “That’s impossible. I tried to buy this place from Mose Flanagan every other month for the last four years. He refused to even consider it.” Her irritation inched up a notch. “Well, apparently he changed his mind. The transaction officially closed yesterday morning. I don’t know why he didn’t tell you the property was for sale.” When his black scowl deepened, she couldn’t resist adding, “Maybe he just didn’t like you.” He opened his mouth to argue, clamped down on his jaw instead, and a muscle jumped in his cheek. Apparently her goading had hit on a portion of the truth.

Mr. Flanagan decided to move in with his son in Calgary. He listed the property for sale several weeks ago with Smith Real Estate in Dawson. I’m the person who bought it.” His features looked even harder than they had before. “That’s impossible. I tried to buy this place from Mose Flanagan every other month for the last four years. He refused to even consider it.” Her irritation inched up a notch. “Well, apparently he changed his mind. The transaction officially closed yesterday morning. I don’t know why he didn’t tell you the property was for sale.” When his black scowl deepened, she couldn’t resist adding, “Maybe he just didn’t like you.” He opened his mouth to argue, clamped down on his jaw instead, and a muscle jumped in his cheek. Apparently her goading had hit on a portion of the truth. “So now you’re the owner,” he said darkly. “That’s right, I am.” He looked her over from head to foot, taking in her Liz Claiborne jeans and the touch of makeup she hadn’t been able to resist. She bristled at his smug expression. “And you actually intend to move in?” “I am in, Mr…?” “Hawkins. McCall Hawkins. I’m your next-door neighbor, so to speak. And I don’t appreciate all that hammering you’ve been doing. I like things nice and quiet. I enjoy my privacy and I don’t like being disturbed. It’ll be easier on both of us if you keep that in mind.” “I’ll do my best,” she lied, thinking of the noisy dredging equipment she intended to use in the stream. She gave him a too-sweet smile. “I’d say it was a pleasure, Mr. Hawkins, but we both know it wasn’t. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.” Turning away from him, she climbed the stairs to the porch, picking up her hammer, and started pounding on the dresser again, dismissing him as if he had never been there. For several long moments, he simply stood there glaring. Then she caught the movement of his shadow as he turned and stalked away, back down the path beside the creek. Of all the nerve. Who the devil did he think he was?

Tell him to stop, a voice inside her said, but all she could think was that Jeremy had never kissed her like this. He had never made her feel like this--not once in the two years they had been together. No one had ever made her feel like this. And she didn’t want the moment to end. Her brain seemed to shut down just then, leaving her body in control. Desire curled like mist through her veins. She fumbled with the buttons on the front of his denim shirt, tore one of them off in her haste to touch him. She jerked the fabric apart and slid her hands inside, pressed her trembling palms against his bare chest. Thick bands of muscle tightened. Crisp brown chest hair curled around the tips of her fingers, and ridges of muscle rippled down his flat stomach. Call made a sound in his throat and a shudder ran the length of his body. His mouth still clung to hers. He jerked up her sweatshirt, cupped her breasts over her white lace bra, and started to work the catch beneath the tiny bow at the front. “Hey, Call! You over here? Call! Is everything all right?” She whimpered as he whipped his mouth away and softly cursed. With an unsteady hand, he jerked down her sweatshirt and stepped protectively in front of her, leaving her shielded behind his body and the trunk of the tree. “Everything’s fine, Toby.” His voice sounded raspy. She wondered if his friend would notice. “I thought I heard shots,” Toby said, “but I was cooking so I didn’t pay all that much attention. Then I went into the living room and found the front door open. When I saw your rifle gone from the rack, I was afraid something bad might have happened.” “Our neighbor, Ms. Sinclair, came nose to nose with her first black bear.” Call looked her way, gave her a quick once-over, saw that she didn’t look too disheveled, and tugged her out from behind the tree. “Charity Sinclair, meet Toby Jenkins. Toby’s chief-cook-and-bottle-washer over at my place, and all-around handyman. At least he is till he leaves for college in the fall. Toby, this is Ms. Sinclair, our new neighbor.” “Nice to meet you, ma’am. I heard Mose sold the place. I’ve been meaning to come over and say hello.” “Forget the ma’am,” Charity told him. “It makes me feel too old. Charity is enough.” He nodded, smiled. He was young, maybe nineteen or twenty, with thick, dark red hair and a few scattered freckles, sort of a young John Kennedy, an attractive boy with what appeared to be a pleasant disposition. She wondered if he could tell by looking at her what had been going on when he arrived. Then she noticed Call’s shirt was open and missing a button and felt her face heating up again.

Hey, Call! You over here? Call! Is everything all right?” She whimpered as he whipped his mouth away and softly cursed. With an unsteady hand, he jerked down her sweatshirt and stepped protectively in front of her, leaving her shielded behind his body and the trunk of the tree. “Everything’s fine, Toby.” His voice sounded raspy. She wondered if his friend would notice. “I thought I heard shots,” Toby said, “but I was cooking so I didn’t pay all that much attention. Then I went into the living room and found the front door open. When I saw your rifle gone from the rack, I was afraid something bad might have happened.” “Our neighbor, Ms. Sinclair, came nose to nose with her first black bear.” Call looked her way, gave her a quick once-over, saw that she didn’t look too disheveled, and tugged her out from behind the tree. “Charity Sinclair, meet Toby Jenkins. Toby’s chief-cook-and-bottle-washer over at my place, and all-around handyman. At least he is till he leaves for college in the fall. Toby, this is Ms. Sinclair, our new neighbor.” “Nice to meet you, ma’am. I heard Mose sold the place. I’ve been meaning to come over and say hello.” “Forget the ma’am,” Charity told him. “It makes me feel too old. Charity is enough.” He nodded, smiled. He was young, maybe nineteen or twenty, with thick, dark red hair and a few scattered freckles, sort of a young John Kennedy, an attractive boy with what appeared to be a pleasant disposition. She wondered if he could tell by looking at her what had been going on when he arrived. Then she noticed Call’s shirt was open and missing a button and felt her face heating up again. Call cleared his throat. “I’ll be home in a couple of minutes, Toby.” “Yes, sir. I’ll have your breakfast waiting.” With a wave good-bye, he set off down the path the way he had come. When Charity turned, she saw Call watching her, his face dark, his expression closed up as it usually was. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.” Oh, God. He was obviously sorry it had and it made her even more embarrassed. “Neither did I. I don’t make a habit of…of…I don’t exactly know what happened.” She studied her feet, then stared off toward the creek. “It must have been the fear, you know? They say when your life is threatened you revert to your most basic instincts.” She risked a glance at him, saw that his jaw looked iron-hard. “Yeah, that must be it.” She glanced away, trying not to think of what they’d just done. Trying not to wonder what would have happened if Toby hadn’t arrived when he did. “You’d better go,” she said, making an effort to smile. “Your breakfast is waiting and I’ve got work to do.” As she started to turn, the sun peeked out from behind a cloud, casting shadows beneath his cheekbones and the little indentation on his chin. He didn’t move when she grabbed the plastic bag of garbage and headed for one of the heavy iron trash cans that were supposed to be bear-proof. She saw him walk over and pick up his rifle, his fingers wrapping around the stock with a casual ease that said he was comfortable with the weapon. He didn’t walk away as she expected. Instead, he stood there watching, waiting until she disappeared inside the house.

People really don’t want such a direct encounter with God because then they have no excuse if they disobey Him. God’s laws are so black-and-white. We’d rather be free to choose if we will follow Him in any given situation.

… This was chronicled in a harsher book and McCaslin, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, had seen it and the boy himself had inherited it as Noah’s grandchildren had inherited the Flood although they had not been there to see the deluge: that dark corrupt and bloody time while three separate people had tried to adjust not only to one another but to the new land which they had created and inherited too and must live in for the reason that those who had lost it were no less free to quit it than those who had gained it were: – those upon whom freedom and equality had been dumped overnight and without warning or preparation or any training in how to employ it or even just endure it and who misused it not as children would nor yet because they had been so long in bondage and then so suddenly freed, but misused it as human beings always misused freedom, so that he thought Apparently there is a wisdom beyond even that learned through suffiring necessary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license; those who had fought for four years and lost to preserve a condition under which that franchisement was anomaly and paradox, for the old reasons for which man (not the generals and politicians but man) has always fought and died in wars: to preserve a status quo or to establish a better future one to endure for his children; and lastly, as if that were not enough for bitterness and hatred and fear, that third race even more alien to the people whom they resembled in pigment and in whom even the same blood ran, than to the people whom they did not, – that race threefold in one and alien even among themselves save for a single fierce aged Quartermaster lieutenants and Army sutlers and contractors in military blankets and shoes and transport mules, who followed the battles they themselves had not fought and inherited the conquest they themselves had not helped to gain, sanctioned and protected even if not blessed, and left their bones and in another generation would be engaged in a fierce economic competition of small sloven farms with the black men they were supposed to have freed and the white descendants of fathers who had owned no slaves anyway whom they were supposed to have disinherited and in the third generation would be back once more in the little lost country seats as barbers and garage mechanics and deputy sheriffs and mill- and gin-hands and power-plant firemen, leading, first in mufti then later in an actual formalized regalia of hooded sheets and passwords and fiery Christian symbols, lynching mobs against the race their ancestors had come to save: and of all that other nameless horde of speculators in human misery, manipulators of money and politics and land, who follow catastrophe and are their own protection as grasshoppers are and need no blessing and sweat no plow or axe-helve and batten and vanish and leave no bones, just as they derived apparently from no ancestry, no mortal flesh, no act even of passion or even of lust: and the Jew who came without protection too since after two thousand years he had got out of the habit of being or needing it, and solitary, without even the solidarity of the locusts and in this a sort of courage since he had come thinking not in terms of simple pillage but in terms of his great-grand-children, seeking yet some place to establish them to endure even though forever alien: and unblessed: a pariah about the face of the Western earth which twenty centuries later was still taking revenge on him for the fairy tale with which he had conquered it. …

singing in the old-fashioned language of this good-hearted man, who sold us Hope at the lowest possible price,

It was clear, even though he opposed slavery, Mister Furley didn't think blacks were near as good as whites. And if blacks were forced to work for less than whites, wasn't that as bad as slavery?

These are the times foretold by the Prophets, ‘when a nation shall be born in a day',” declared the call for a black political gathering in 1865. A Tennessee newspaper commented in 1869 that freedmen habitually referred to slavery as Paul’s Time, and Reconstruction as Isaiah’s Time (referring perhaps to Paul’s message of obedience and humility, and Isaiah’s prophecy of cataclysmic change brought about by violence). God, who had “scourged America with war for her injustice to the black man,” had allowed his agent Lincoln, like Moses, to glimpse the promised land of “universal freedom” and then mysteriously removed him before he “reached its blessed fruitions.

Moses was weeping as much as the rest of them. Joshua was angry. He had been in the tent when Yahweh commanded Moses what to do. He had seen the idolatry of Israel as it worshipped Ba’al and the other gods of the pantheon. They were not yet in their Promised Land of Canaan, and they were already playing the harlot with Ba’al of Peor. It was a form of spiritual adultery. Yahweh had taken care of them in the desert wilderness these forty years until all the original gripers and complainers were dead. They had just conquered the Transjordan and the mighty Og of Bashan as a prelude to Canaan. And still—still—these pathetic miserable backsliding wretches were already fornicating with Ba’al like wanton harlots. They worshipped household idols and even engaged in human sacrifice on Mount Nebo to the god of plague. The plague was therefore an ugly but fitting expression of a spiritual judgment. Afflicted Israelites would get puss filled boils and rashes in their genitals and anus like a sexual disease. Their excrement would be full of blood, both solid and liquid, and excruciatingly painful to release. After a few days, if the victim did not get well, their genitals would turn black and rot. Within a week, the victim would be dead.

Why do you like me, Moses?” I huffed, hands on my hips. I was tired of being pushed and pulled, never knowing what he really wanted. “Who says I do?” he answered softly. But he turned his eyes on me. And his eyes kept me hopeful when his words would have crushed me. His eyes said he did. “Is that one of your laws? Thou shall not like Georgia? “Nah. It’s thou shall not get strung up.” His words made me sick. “Strung up? Like lynched? That’s just sick Moses. We may sound like hicks. I may say seen when I should say saw. I may say was when I should say were. We may be small town people with small town ways. But you being black, or whatever color you are, doesn’t matter to anyone here. This isn’t the sixties, and it sure as hell ain’t the Deep South.” “But it’s Georgia,” he answered softly, playing games with my name the way I had done. “And you’re a sweet Georgia peach with fuzzy pink skin, and I’m not biting.

Did you see which way he went?” I asked, casting my eyes across the field. “No,” he answered finally. “I was too busy watching you fall.” “I rode for a while before that,” I answered defensively. “We cleared two fences.” “Is that normal for you?” “What?” “Riding without a saddle, full out, on a horse that obviously doesn’t want to be ridden?” “He gave me his head . . . I thought he was ready. I was wrong.” “He gave you his head?” “Yeah . . . never mind. It’s horse speak. When a horse lets you control his head, pull it all the way back along his body, move it this way and that, he’s yours. But Lucky’s never been ridden. I needed to court him a little more.” Moses’s lips were pursed and his eyebrows quirked and I thought for a minute he was going to laugh. I seemed to have that effect on him. “Shut up,” I said. He laughed, just as I predicted. “I didn’t say anything!” “But you’re thinking it.” “What am I thinking?” “Something dirty. I can see it all over your face.” “Nah. That’s not dirt. I’m just black.” “Har, har.

Henry wouldn’t look at me. “Henry? Whose ass do I need to kick?” “You can’t.” “I can’t what? Kick a giant’s ass?” I said softly, remembering his cryptic talk of giants. “Not a giant. A girl,” Henry whispered. “A girl?” I wouldn’t have been more surprised if he told me Millie had punched him in the face. “My friend.” I shook my head. “No. Not a friend. Friends don’t smack you around.” Henry looked at me and raised his eyebrows doubtfully. Touché. “Well, they don’t smack you around unless you ask them to,” I amended, thinking of all my friends at the gym who regularly slapped me around. “What did you do?” I asked, trying to understand. “Did you say something that upset her? Or is she just a bully?” “I told her she was like a sumo wrestler,” Henry said softly. “You said that to her?” I yelped. “Ah, Henry. Don’t tell me you said that to her.” It was all I could do not to laugh. I covered my mouth so Henry wouldn’t see my lips twitching. Henry looked crushed. “Sumo wrestlers are heroes in Japan,” he insisted. “Henry,” I groaned. “Do you like this girl?” Henry nodded. “Cool. Why?” “Sumo wrestlers are powerful,” Henry said. “Henry, come on, man. You don’t like her because she’s powerful,” I insisted. Henry looked confused. “Wait. You do?” Now I was confused. “The average sumo wrestler weighs over 400 pounds. They are huge.” “But she’s not huge, is she?” “No. Not huge.” “Does she look like a sumo wrestler?” I asked. Henry shook his head. “No. But she’s big . . . maybe bigger than other girls?” Henry nodded. Okay now we were getting somewhere. “So she punched you when you told her she reminded you of a sumo wrestler.” Another nod. “She blacked your cheekbone and split your lip.” Henry nodded again and smiled slightly, as if he was almost proud of her. “Why did you say that, Henry? She obviously didn’t like it.” I couldn’t think of a girl who would. Henry gritted his jaw and fisted his hands in his hair, obviously frustrated. “Sumo wrestlers are awesome!” he cried.

I believe it is not important how long you live, but that you give yourself to living. Live as only you can, with every part of you fully engaged.

That’s how the grievin’ becomes after a time. You’ve tossed off the black blanket, but scraps of it fall on you unexpected, your life always a quilt with a dark patch or two. The Good Lord uses those to show off the bright colors, I think.

as well as Biblically. First, the Negro’s black skin is not the mark of Cain as so many, even some preachers, claim. If that were true, that would make the Negro our distant cousin, distant but still part of the same family. They are not part of the human race, distant or otherwise. Don’t

if the European Jews are “in fact” the Real Jews of the Bible, according to the “Law of Moses” from the God of Israel, the Jews should be receiving the “Curses of Israel” for breaking God’s commandments in regards to “usury” as listed in the Torah.  But they are not receiving any “Curses”.

He is both heir and prototype simultaneously of all the geography and climate and biology which sired old Carothers and all the rest of us and our kind, myriad, countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who fathered himself, intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all blood black white yellow or red, including his own.

The black man’s got no business with Christianity. They’ve even got us looking up at some white Jesus. Jesus was black. It says so in the Bible. It says that Solomon was black; it says that Moses was black. But here they’ve told us a lie. They took the Bible and rewrote it for themselves, telling us that they were white so we’d be looking up to them for being white. If you look up to Jesus and Jesus was white, you got to look up to these white men because they’re white.

(The distribution of playgrounds Moses constructed) was not at all even. The areas of the maps on which the dots were clustered most thickly corresponded in the main to those areas inhabited by families that were well-to-do or at least "comfortable." The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly corresponded in part to undeveloped outlying areas of the city that did not really need playgrounds, but they corresponded also to some of the city's most congested areas, to the tenement neighborhoods and slums inhabited by families that were poor—to areas that needed playgrounds desperately. Most of Robert Moses' neighborhood playgrounds had, in other words, been built in the neighborhoods that needed playgrounds least. Few of the playgrounds had been built in the neighborhoods that needed playgrounds most. The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes. Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930's. He built one playground in Harlem. (...) “After a building program that had tripled the city's supply of playgrounds, there was still almost no place for approximately 200,000 of the city's children—the 200,000 with black skin—to play in their own neighborhoods except the streets or abandoned, crumbling, filthy, looted tenements stinking of urine and vomit; or vacant lots carpeted with rusty tin cans, jagged pieces of metal, dog feces and the leavings, spilling out of rotting paper shopping bags, of human meals. Children with white skin had been given swings and seesaws and sliding ponds. Children with black skin had been left with the old broomsticks that served them as baseball bats. Children with white skin had been given wading pools to splash in in summer. If children with black skin wanted to escape the heat of the slums, they could remove the covers from fire hydrants and wade through their outwash, as they had always waded, in gutters that were sometimes so crammed with broken glass that they glistened in the sun.

My sins are running out behind me, and I do not see them, and I come to judge the sins of another!

Percy Mosely was running a special on a vegetable plate: collards, black-eyed peas, candied yams, cornbread, and banana pudding for two-fifty, during the week of the Hope House grand opening, only. After that, three bucks.

She had matured over the years, growing into a gorgeous blonde with long legs, big blue eyes, and coal-black lashes that stood out against the backdrop of her Irish skin, having a darling face full of freckles. Her cheery disposition made her approachable—for not every girl had mastered the art of emotional disarmament. Lauren had. Miraculously, she was both popular—singled out, destined for success—and down-to-earth, a girl less concerned with her looks and more with the head she carried on her slender shoulders.

There she was before him in all her Aboriginal glory. Brown eyes and skin so tan it was nearly black. Her smile—a wondrous thing. Her lips—he imagined that by the end of summer, they’d be kissing him on the way home from Gravity Park. To Iron, elevated as she was in his poetic imagination, she had become something else entirely, obscuring lines between fact and fiction, between science and religion. Nothing made sense—and yet everything did.

Tubman and her crew successfully loaded everyone on the ships and went upstream to raid the homes of some of the most prestigious plantation families in the state. They stole goods from the mansions and set fire to approximately thirty-four properties. Although historians disagree on the number of people Tubman led to freedom in this summer raid, scholars confirm that at least 750 made it to freedom. Official Confederate reports noted that whoever led this “well guided attack” was “thoroughly acquainted with the river and county.”20 Once again, Tubman showed that she was the Moses of her people, shepherding them out of slavery, even during the Civil War.

It was empty at this hour of Sunday evening—no family in wagon, no writer, no walkers churchward to speak to him and carefully refrain from looking after him when he had passed—the pale, powder-light, powder-dry dust of August from which the long week's marks of hoof and wheel had been blotted by the strolling and unhurried Sunday shoes, with somewhere beneath them, vanished but not gone, fixed and held in the annealing dust, the narrow, splaytoed prints of his wife's bare feet where on Saturday afternoons she would walk to the commissary to buy their next week's supplies while he took his bath; himself, his own prints, setting the period now, as he strode on, moving almost as fast as a smaller man could have trotted, his body breasting the air her body had vacated, his eyes touching the objects—post and tree and field and house and hill—her eyes had lost.

The day after Republicans used Black votes to regain the House in the 1906 midterm elections, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge (and loss of pensions) of 167 Black soldiers in the 25th Infantry Regiment, a Black unit that had been a huge source of Black pride. A dozen or so members of the regiment had been falsely accused of murdering a bartender and wounding a police officer in the horrifically racist town of Brownsville, Texas, on August 13, 1906. Overnight, the most popular US president in Black communities since Abraham Lincoln became the most unpopular. “Once enshrined in our hearts as Moses,” shouted out a Harlem pastor, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Roosevelt was “now enshrouded in our scorn as Judas.” In the final days of 1906, it was hard to find an African American who was not spitting ire at the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt’s efforts to regain Black support with new Black federal appointments failed. Sounding the indignation of the observant press, the New York Times reported that “not a particle of evidence” had been given to prove the men were guilty. Roosevelt was defiant in his Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1906 (defiant in his crude attempts to gain southern White voters). He warned “respectable colored people… not to harbor criminals,” meaning the criminals of Brownsville. And then he turned to lynchings: “The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.

ships arriving from the eastern Mediterranean were directed. There, vessels from suspect areas were impounded to be scrubbed and fumigated. At the same time crew and passengers were taken ashore under guard and isolated. The cargo and the passengers’ personal effects were unloaded, turned out in the sun, fumigated, and aired. Only at the end of forty days were the goods and passengers released to enter the city. The period of confinement, termed “quarantine” after the Italian word quaranta (forty), constituted the core of the public health strategy. Its duration was based on Christian Scripture, as both the Old and New Testaments make multiple references to the number forty in the context of purification: the forty days and forty nights of the flood in Genesis, the forty years of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai before receiving the Ten Commandments, the forty days of Christ’s temptation, the forty days Christ stayed with his disciples after his resurrection, and the forty days of Lent. With such religious sanction, the conviction held that forty days were sufficient to cleanse the hull of a ship, the bodies of its passengers and crew, and the cargo it carried. All pestilential vapors would be harmlessly dispersed, and the city would be spared. Meanwhile, the biblical resonance of quarantine would fortify compliance with the administrative rigor involved and would provide spiritual comfort for a terrified city.

Black suffrage, of course, was the most radical element of Congressional Reconstruction, but this too derived from a variety of motives and calculations. For Radicals, it represented the culmination of a lifetime of reform. For others, it seemed less the fulfillment of an idealistic creed than an alternative to prolonged federal intervention in the Southh, a means of enabling blacks to defend themselves against abuse, while relieving the nation of that responsibility. Many Republicans placed utopian burdens upon the right to votet. "The vote," Radical Senator Richard Yates exclaimed, "will finish the negro question; it will settle everything connected with this question...We need no vast expenditures, we need no standing army....Sir, the ballot is the freedman's Moses." When such expectations proved unrealistic, disillusionment was certain to follow.

I was thinking over this story, just lying in my bed, smoking a stupid cigarette—still pretending to, at least—when it happened. I swear it did. Jessica moved in my bed and I glanced at her and noticed for the first time how pretty her eyelashes were, and how her jet-black eyebrows seemed to sleep on her face. And I swear to God I heard what the hell Moeller talked about. I swear. It happened just like he said it did. One second, I was smoking cigarettes, thinking about something stupid—and thee next, I knew I was going to stop all of the stupid-think and marry this girl.

The alarms of all the black people in Brit'n are timed to ring before the rest of the population. It is their destiny to be up at the crack o'dawn.

Yo mama is so old… she knew Burger King while he was still a prince. Yo mama is so old… her first pet was a T-Rex! Yo mama is so old… she took her driving test on a dinosaur! Yo mama is so old… her birth certificate says expired on it. Yo mama is so old… she dated George Washington! Yo mama is so old… she has an autographed Bible! Yo mama is so old… that her bus pass is in hieroglyphics! Yo mama is so old… her birth certificate is in Roman numerals. Yo mama is so old… she used to babysit Adam and Eve! Yo mama is so old… her memory is in black and white! Yo mama is so old… she was wearing a Jesus starter jacket! Yo mama is so old… she farts dust! Yo mama is so old… she knew the Great Wall of China when it was only good! Yo mama is so old… she ran track with dinosaurs. Yo mama is so old… she has a picture of Moses in her yearbook. Yo mama is so old… that when she was in school there was no history class. Yo mama is so old… her social security number is 1! Yo mama is so old… she knew the Dead Sea when it started getting sick! Yo mama is so old… she helped serve the Last Supper! Yo mama is so old… I told her to act her own age, and she died. Yo mama is so old… she knew Mr. Clean when he had a head full of hair! Yo mama is so old… I took a picture of her and it came out black and white!

Mormon-black relations. This work’s central thesis was that two factors drove Brigham Young to implement the Church’s black ban by 1852. Most important was a developing sense of Mormon “whiteness” wherein Latter-day Saints identified themselves as a divinely “chosen” people, while conversely labeling blacks a biblically cursed race, given their skin color and alleged descent from the accursed biblical counter-figures of Cain, Ham, and Canaan. Further motivating Young was his embrace of black slavery, which he considered divinely sanctioned. Thus as Utah Territorial Governor he called for its legalization—this occurring in February 1852, shortly following Mormon migration to the Great Basin. Utah became the only western territory to approve slavery. Young in calling for this statute claimed a divinely sanctioned link between black servitude and black priesthood denial—the latter practice made public for the first time in his 1852 statement calling for black slavery. The dissertation also drew a number of conclusions relative to the perpetuation of the black priesthood and temple ban. The ban was firmly established by the time of Brigham Young’s death in 1877, given that the Mormon leader repeatedly affirmed its divine legitimacy over the previous quarter century. Further assuring perpetuation of the ban was official LDS embrace of the historical myth that Joseph Smith established the restriction. Such mythmaking received scriptural justification through canonization of the Pearl of Great Price in 1880, a work consisting of the Books of Moses and Abraham. All such developments made the subordinate status of Mormon blacks virtually “irreversible by 1880,” enabling the ban to continue unchanged into the mid-1970s.13

Water is white when it’s angry. Blue when it’s calm. Red when the sun sets, black at midnight. And water is clear when it falls. Clear when it washes through my head and out my fingertips. Water is clear and it washes all the colors away, it washes all the pictures away.

Tisn't life that matters, but the Courage yer bring to it…." That, of course, at once explained everything. It explained his own father and his home, it explained poor Mrs. Prothero and her two sons who were drowned, it explained Stephen's cousin who was never free from the most painful rheumatics, and it explained Stephen himself who was never afraid of any one or anything. Peter stared at Frosted Moses, whose white beard was shining in the fire-place and his boots were like large black boats; but the old man was drawing at his pipe, and had made his remark apparently in connection with nothing at all. Peter was also disappointed to see that the room at large had paid no attention to the declaration. Courage. That was what they were all there for, and soon, later in the evening, he would take his beating like a man, and would not cry out as he had done the last time.

He could not see all of the room because there were depths that the darkness seized and filled, and the great fiery place, with its black-stained settle, was full of mysterious shadows. A huge fire was burning and leaping in the fastnesses of that stone cavity, and it was by the light of this alone that the room was illumined—and this had the effect as Peter noticed, of making certain people, like Mother Figgis and Jane Clewer, quite monstrous, and fantastic with their skirts and hair and their shadows on the wall. Before Frosted Moses had said that sentence about Courage, Peter had been taking the room in. Because he had been there very often before he knew every flagstone in the floor and every rafter in the roof and all the sporting pictures on the walls, and the long shining row of mugs and coloured plates by the fire-place and the cured hams hanging from the ceiling … but to-night was Christmas Eve and a very especial occasion, and he was sure to be beaten when he got home, and so must make the very most of his time.

At 23, I took the example Of Moses and Jesus And went 40 days without food. In the end, Moses saw his god's glory, Jesus overcame the devil, I got a divorce. Living in a black and white world, Resembling a silent movie, I'd fasted over 120 days that year And it ended in the death of something. Moses wandered a desert, Jesus was crucified. Buddhists call it Samsara, The circle of life and death. We all go through it over and over In our lifetime. I've learned not to cling To the Mountain of Transfiguration Or the Valley of Death. Our life is filled with both and they are needed. At 33, I've learned it's best to receive life As It comes, let go of how you think it will go. Rumi said to die before you die. If you follow his advice, you will live your life alive, And when death comes you will recognize him As someone you've walked with before.

On the working-class, multiethnic Upper West Side alone, Moses bulldozed two stable communities of color. One, along West 98th and 99th Streets, he destroyed as a gift to the builders of a market-rate development called Manhattantown (now Park West Village). At a reunion in 2011, a former resident told the Times, “It was a great neighborhood to live in. I remember playing jacks, eating Icees, playing stickball and dodge ball, jumping double Dutch and when it got really hot out they would open up the fire hydrants.” Said another, “It wasn’t a slum; why tear it down?” The other neighborhood was San Juan Hill, destroyed to make way for Lincoln Center. An African-American and Latino working-class community, San Juan Hill was full of theaters, dance halls, and jazz clubs. In the early 1900s, it was the center of black cultural life in Manhattan, where James P. Johnson wrote the song “The Charleston,” inspired by southern black dockworkers on the Hudson River. Still, it was branded as “blight.” While they fought the city in court, 7,000 families and 800 small businesses were removed and scattered.

I was thinking over this story, just lying in my bed, smoking a stupid cigarette—still pretending to, at least—when it happened. I swear it did. Jessica moved in my bed and I glanced at her and noticed for the first time how pretty her eyelashes were, and how her jet-black eyebrows seemed to sleep on her face. And I swear to God I heard what the hell Moeller talked about. I swear. It happened just like he said it did. One second, I was smoking cigarettes, thinking about something stupid—and the next, I knew I was going to stop all of the stupid-think and marry this girl.

It makes a difference whether Moses or Jeroboam writes the history curriculum.

The violence of Jim Crow has given way to craftier present-day methods of disenfranchising marginalized communities, according to this stirring history of American voting rights. Thomas begins by recapping laws that historically prevented Black people in segregated Southern states from voting, including exorbitant poll taxes and absurdly complicated “literacy” tests required of Black would-be voters but not white voters. More brutal methods were also used, the author notes; Black Southerners who tried to register to vote were often fired, evicted, arrested, beaten, or even killed. Thomas goes on to explore today’s subtler means of voter suppression. These include voter ID laws that disproportionately disqualify minorities who lack official documents; laws that reduce the numbers of polling locations or make absentee voting harder; purges of voter lists; and restrictions on who can vote. Thomas weaves in detailed narratives of voting-rights milestones, like the 1965 voter registration drive and marches in Selma, Alabama, that led to police violence and galvanized the passage of the Voting Rights Act; he also explores later Supreme Court decisions that weakened the VRA and contemporary efforts to restore it. Throughout, the author spotlights voting-rights heroes from Bob Moses, who was beaten while leading a 1961 Mississippi registration drive, to Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia who founded Fair Fight Action, which registered thousands of voters and helped deliver Georgia to Joe Biden in 2020. Thomas combines deep dives into voting law with vivid, dramatic retellings of epic civil rights battles; his prose is lucid and perceptive, with occasional elegant perorations on the sacredness of the franchise. (“When people lose the power to vote, they lose the ability to choose their defenders. They lose representatives who understand, care about, and work to protect their rights. As a result, the US as a whole loses its voice.”) The result is a captivating history that shows how relevant the defense of voting rights remains. An erudite and engrossing look at the perennial struggle to safeguard the cornerstone of democracy.

The 13th Century Cabbalist Moses ben Nahmenides associated Azazel with the planet Mars and the demons under his command are the biblical ‘Seirim’. His realm is in the places of desolation. His power emanated that which causes destruction, he ascends to the stars of the sword, blood, wars, disorder. His rule was in antiquity included the tribes of Esau, those who live by the sword. To offer incense, food or libations to the Seirim as fertility spirits is to honor Azazel. To know of such spirits, divination via Necromancy may be performed using dreams and the black mirror among other techniques.

But it was not just the Christian community that paid homage in their churches that day. Among the Jewish community, especially of London, Prince Albert was mourned in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. The Jews, who had much to thank the Prince for his impartiality on religious matters, marked the occasion with special services in synagogues, several of them draped in black. Sermons on the dead Prince were delivered at London’s historic Sephardi synagogue (the Bevis Marks in the City) and the two Ashkenazi congregations (the Great and the Hambro synagogues). At the West London synagogue every seat was filled long before the service and the roads leading up to it were jammed with vehicles. Here the congregation heard a sermon by Dr Marks taking as its text the words of Jeremiah IX:19: ‘A voice of lamentation is heard from Zion. How are we bereaved!’ And at his own privately built synagogue on his estate in Ramsgate, the philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore and his wife attended a special service where the reading desk was covered with black cloth, ‘the only symbol of mourning we ever had in our synagogue’. All in all, as one British Jew later reported to a friend in South Africa, there had been ‘not a dry eye in the synagogues’; prayers for Prince Albert had continued all day. ‘The people mourned for him as much as for Hezekiah; and, indeed, he deserved it a great deal better’ was his somewhat unorthodox conclusion.