Riot Baby Quotes

Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot; and there ain't any real difference between triplets and a insurrection. - The Babies speech 1879

When you have a purpose that doesn't involve hurting someone else, it changes the way you walk.

Look at outside. We don't have drug dealers on the corners anymore. I can't remember the last time someone was shot on this block. My church-goers can come and go in peace." "When there isn't a curfew. Pastor, this isn't peace. This is order

It's not till she's outside that she realizes what she was looking for in there. What she's been looking for all these years. What she realizes now she no longer needs. Permission. I am the locusts, Ella sends the thought out like a concussive wave, so that it hits every surveillance orb in the neighborhood, every wired cop, every crabtank in the nearby precinct. I am the locusts and the frogs and the rivers of blood. I'm here now.

Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. Look out, said Moira to me, over the phone. Here it comes. Here what comes? I said. You wait, she said. They've been building up to this. It's you and me up against the wall, baby. She was quoting an expression of my mother's, but she wasn't intending to be funny.

Songs do not change the world,’ declares Jasper. ‘People do. People pass laws, riot, hear God and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars.’ Jasper lights a Marlboro. ‘Which begs a question. “Who or what influences the minds of the people who change the world?” My answer is “Ideas and feelings.” Which begs a question. “Where do ideas and feelings originate?” My answer is, “Others. One’s heart and mind. The press. The arts. Stories. Last, but not least, songs.” Songs. Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time. Who knows where they’ll land? Or what they’ll bring?’ Jasper leans into the mic and, without a wisp of self-consciousness, sings a miscellany of single lines from nine or ten songs. Dean recognises, ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, ‘Strange Fruit’ and ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’. Others, Dean can’t identify, but the hardboiled press pack look on. Nobody laughs, nobody scoffs. Cameras click. ‘Where will these song-seeds land? It’s the Parable of the Sower. Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don’t take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready. Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy. Assurance. Cathartic sorrow. The idea that life could be, should be, better than this. An invitation to slip into somebody else’s skin for a little while. If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world.

I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in drink—oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of course—very shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the graces and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin. But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living, what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a bedlam of riot and stench. Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them, devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay and munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel blinks at the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields, and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand. But the clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of light. From the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to the hour when they lounge back into it again they never live one moment of real life. Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle words to them. From the day when their baby eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the day when, with an oath, they close them forever and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they never warm to one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to a single thought, never start to a single hope. In the name of the God of mercy; let them pour the maddening liquor down their throats and feel for one brief moment that they live!

And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity 'because,' says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, 'you can’t indict an algorithm.

They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on. Look out, said Moira to me, over the phone. Here it comes. Here what comes? I said. You wait, she said. They’ve been building up to this. It’s you and me up against the wall, baby. She was quoting an expression of my mother’s, but she wasn’t intending to be funny.

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. Look out, said Moira to me, over the phone. Here it comes. Here what comes? I said. You wait, she said. They've been building up to this. It's you and me up against the wall, baby. She was quoting an expression of my mother's, but she wasn't intending to be funny.   Things

Dana drew in a sharp breath. “Reach out your hand, sis. Jon’s right beside you.” Through the eerie green light of his enhanced night vision, Eli watched Dana slowly extend her hand, palm up. Jon shifted closer. “I’m here,” he whispered. He touched her hand with his fingertips at first, afraid a strong grip might send her into a panic. He wanted to hold her in his arms, doubted she’d let him. His emotions rioting all over the spectrum, Jon inched closer, moving slow until her fingers wrapped around his hand and tugged. He swallowed hard, longed to gather her into his arms and never let go. The clock in his head, however, denied the chance for more than a minute or two at most. Her hand still in his, Jon sat beside Dana, moved his hands to her forearms and let her make the next move. Jon’s heart almost leaped out of his chest when she flung herself into his arms. He pulled her close, his throat tight. “I’ve got you, baby. No one will take you from me, I promise.” He placed a soft kiss on her neck. “We’ll have to fight our way out of here. Can you run?

In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. [...] College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teachins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook. [...]Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

He was sitting at his desk. He had to get some relief from seeing what he did not want to see. The factory was empty. There was only the night watchman who’d come on duty with his dogs. He was down in the parking lot, patrolling the perimeter of the double-thick chain-link fence, a fence topped off, after the riots, with supplemental scrolls of razor ribbon that were to admonish the boss each and every morning he pulled in and parked his car, “Leave! Leave! Leave!” He was sitting alone in the last factory left in the worst city in the world. And it was worse even than sitting there during the riots, Springfield Avenue in flames, South Orange Avenue in flames, Bergen Street under attack, sirens going off, weapons firing, snipers from rooftops blasting the street lights, looting crowds crazed in the street, kids carrying off radios and lamps and television sets, men toting armfuls of clothing, women pushing baby carriages heavily loaded with cartons of liquor and cases of beer, people pushing pieces of new furniture right down the center of the street, stealing sofas, cribs, kitchen tables, stealing washers and dryers and ovens—stealing not in the shadows but out in the open. Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The shattering of glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold. This is shoplifting. Everything free that everyone craves, a wonton free-for-all free of charge, everyone uncontrollable with thinking, Here it is! Let it come! In Newark’s burning Mardi Gras streets, a force is released that feels redemptive, something purifying is happening, something spiritual and revolutionary perceptible to all. The surreal vision of household appliances out under the stars and agleam in the glow of the flames incinerating the Central Ward promises the liberation of all mankind. Yes, here it is, let it come, yes, the magnificent opportunity, one of human history’s rare transmogrifying moments: the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again to be resurrected, instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its abatement will take the next five hundred years. The fire this time—and next? After the fire? Nothing. Nothing in Newark ever again.

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on. Look out, said Moira to me, over the phone. Here it comes. Here what comes? I said. You wait, she said. They’ve been building up to this. It’s you and me up against the wall, baby. She was quoting an expression of my mother’s, but she wasn’t intending to be funny. Things continued in that state of suspended animation for weeks, although some things did happen. Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful. They said that new elections would be held, but that it would take some time to prepare for them. The thing to do, they said, was to continue on as usual.

Songs do not change the world,” declares Jasper. “People do. People pass laws, riot, hear God, and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars.” Jasper lights a Marlboro. “Which raises a question. ‘Who or what influences the minds of the people who change the world?’ My answer is ‘Ideas and feelings.’ Which begs a question. ‘Where do ideas and feelings originate?’ My answer is, ‘Others. One’s heart and mind. The press. The arts. Stories. Last, but not least, songs.’ Songs. Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time. Who knows where they’ll land? Or what they’ll bring?” Jasper leans into the mic and, without a wisp of self-consciousness, sings a miscellany of single lines from nine or ten songs. Dean recognizes “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Strange Fruit,” and “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” Others, Dean can’t identify, but the hardboiled press pack look on. Nobody laughs, nobody scoffs. Cameras click. “Where will these song-seeds land? It’s the Parable of the Sower. Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don’t take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready. Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy. Assurance. Cathartic sorrow. The idea that life could be, should be, better than this. An invitation to slip into somebody else’s skin for a little while. If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world.

Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence... 'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.

I got your flowers. They’re beautiful, thank you.” A gorgeous riot of Gerber daisies and lilies in a rainbow of reds, pinks, yellows and oranges. “Welcome. Bet Duncan loved sending one of his guys out to pick them up for me.” She could hear the smile in his voice, imagined the devilish twinkle in his eyes. “Oh, he did. Said it’s probably the first time in the history of WITSEC that a U.S. Marshal delivered flowers to one of their witnesses.” A low chuckle. “Well, this was a special circumstance, so they helped me out.” “I loved the card you sent with them the best though.” Proud of you. Give ‘em hell tomorrow. He’d signed it Nathan rather than Nate, which had made her smile. “I had no idea you were romantic,” she continued. “All these interesting things I’m learning about you.” She hadn’t been able to wipe the silly smile off her face after one of the security team members had knocked on her door and handed them to her with a goofy smile and a, “special delivery”. “Baby, you haven’t seen anything yet. When the trial’s done you’re gonna get all the romance you can handle, and then some.” “Really?” Now that was something for a girl to look forward to, and it sure as hell did the trick in taking her mind off her worries. “Well I’m all intrigued, because it’s been forever since I was romanced. What do you have in mind? Candlelit dinners? Going to the movies? Long walks? Lazy afternoon picnics?” “Not gonna give away my hand this early on, but I’ll take those into consideration.” “And what’s the key to your heart, by the way? I mean, other than the thing I did to you this morning.” “What thing is that? Refresh my memory,” he said, a teasing note in his voice. She smiled, enjoying the light banter. It felt good to let her worry about tomorrow go and focus on what she had to look forward to when this was all done. Being with him again, seeing her family, getting back to her life. A life that would hopefully include Nathan in a romantic capacity. “Waking you up with my mouth.” He gave a low groan. “I loved every second of it. But think simpler.” Simpler than sex? For a guy like him? “Food, then. I bet you’re a sucker for a home-cooked meal. Am I right?” He chuckled. “That works too, but it’s still not the key.” “Then what?” “You.” She blinked, her heart squeezing at the conviction behind his answer. “Me?” “Yeah, just you. And maybe bacon,” he added, a smile in his voice. He was so freaking adorable. “So you’re saying if I made and served you a BLT, you’d be putty in my hands?” Seemed hard to imagine, but okay. A masculine rumble filled her ears. “God, yeah.” She couldn’t help the sappy smile that spread across her face. “Wow, you are easy. And I can definitely arrange that.” “I can hardly wait. Will you serve it to me naked? Or maybe wearing just a frilly little apron and heels?” She smothered a laugh, but a clear image of her doing just that popped into her head, serving him the sandwich in that sexy outfit while watching his eyes go all heated. “Depends on how good you are.” “Oh, baby, I’ll be so good to you, you have no idea.

Wars and riots and mutinies, famine, disaster and the crash of dynasties - the process of birth stopped for none of these things.

In February 2022, in Nashville, Tennessee, Pastor Greg Locke accused six members of his Global Vision Bible Church of being quite literally “devil-worshipping Satanist witches,” two of them in the ladies’ Bible study group. In a video shared on social media, he screamed accusations of “pharmakeia” (witchcraft with drugs, poisons, and remedies), burning sage (a Native American cleansing practice), being Freemasons, and bewitching fellow worshippers. He has also made QAnon-inspired accusations that then House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi was a “demon baby-killing pedophile” and former secretary of state and first lady Hillary Clinton a “high priestess in the Satanic church.” These claims were also made by those responsible for the Capitol riot of 2021 and an attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022.

Catherine lived in a two-story Craftsman. It wasn’t much from the outside. No landscaping, a crumbling porch, paint chipping off the rails and trim. The windows couldn’t have done much to regulate the temperature. They had to be at least thirty years old, and only half had screens. This surprised me. Catherine was fastidious in all ways, but her house was a bit of a wreck. The neighborhood was all right. At least she wasn’t in imminent danger of being shot or mugged when she stepped outside. There were no cars in her driveway, so I wasn’t certain she was home. I reached for the doorbell but hesitated. Probably better to knock, just in case Josephine was sleeping. As I’d been told more than once, babies did a lot of that. It took a while. So long, I was about to give up when the door finally swung open. “Elliot?” Catherine stood in the open doorway, waiting for me to say something. The problem was, I’d been rendered speechless. The Catherine I knew was buttoned up to her neck, hair tied back, conservative, and almost modest in her style. The woman in front of me was barely dressed. Her shorts stopped at the top of thick, creamy, tattooed thighs. Her tank top didn’t cover any more of her. Her breasts nearly spilled out of the low neckline, belly button peeking out from the gap above her shorts. Her bare arms were covered in colorful tattoos from wrist to shoulder. Her hair, which was always tamed into submission, spilled around her shoulders and neck in a violent riot. It wasn’t curls like I’d always suspected, but wild, licking, wavy flames that shot out in all directions. I met her eyes, which were wide with alarm, and finally found my voice. “This isn’t what you look like.

A great majority of Americans are going to resist you know. They’ll resist all of this government spending and putting people on the government dole. What do I do about that?” Johnson asked, worriedly. “If you begin to have a backlash, I propose you expand the involvement in Vietnam, and have the Department of Defense draft a lot of young men whose families lean anti-government or are religious in nature. Of course, you’ll also get young men who are part of the establishment, which I’ll use later on to bring about more control over the American people. I’ll get my people to whip anti-authority types into a frenzy, have them accuse returning soldiers of being baby killers, or I’ll get them to cause riots, and maybe a couple of them will terrorize parts of the United States. That will give you the distraction you need to get our agenda passed. No one, not even future Republicans, will attempt to take it out of the books as the law of the land. Are you on board?” “You bet your bottom dollar I am. I look forward to informing Congress and the Nation about what I plan on doing. This should be interesting times.

By force-marching his exhausted men through the unknown, rain-swept wilderness of the German-infested Teutoburg Forest, this guy had just made a brain-explodingly boneheaded mistake so amazing in its incompetence that it makes the Roman consuls at Cannae look like a conjoined triplet made out of Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and that dude from Total Recall who had the baby coming out of his stomach. In terms of career moves, marching three legions into the Teutoberg was the Classical Age equivalent of coauthoring an academic paper with the Unabomber or asking Charles Manson to write you a letter of recommendation for law school. Unsurprisingly, this came back to bite him in the ass. We don’t know exactly how many Germans were hiding in the woods, watching the column of imperial invaders trudge past. The Germans didn’t bother to write anything down more detailed than “killed sum d00ds 2day lulz,” and the only Romans who managed to run screaming out of this forest alive were the ones who knew better than to sit there and try to count how many GWAR fans were currently trying to brutally dismember them with axes. Let’s just say it was probably a crapload, and that when these long-haired death metal freaks unleashed a bloodcurdling shout and started charging through the forest like a bunch of gigantic mutant Ewok-Wookies ambushing the Imperial Stormtroopers on the Forest Moon of Endor it wasn’t exactly the sort of hilarious laugh riot you might see in an animated GIF involving unicorns, rainbows, and cartoon kitties with Pop-Tarts where their bodies are supposed to be. Bellowing like madmen, these balls-out, frothing-at-the-mouth, beer-swilling sausage fiends went Leeroy Jenkins toward the enemy, blitzkrieging out of the woods from every side seemingly at the same time, their ferociousness magnified not only by their savage blood rage, but by the fact that some of the dudes had taken to painting their entire bodies black with mud to help them hide in the dark forest like how Schwarzenegger hid from the Predator’s infrared vision. It was so damned terrifying that it took every ounce of Roman discipline to not simply spontaneously combust into blood vapor on the spot.

Being one of the guys meant I could not go on being the woman I’d become expert at being among men. It was a version of myself I’d first tasted way back when I was a child of eleven and I’d felt that prickly rush of power when grown men would turn their heads to look at me or whistle or say Hey pretty baby just loudly enough that I could hear. The one I’d banked on all through high school, starving myself thin, playing cute and dumb so I’d be popular and loved. The one I’d fostered all through my young adult years while trying on different costumes—earth girl, punk girl, cowgirl, riot girl, ballsy girl. The one for whom behind every hot pair of boots or sexy little skirt or flourish of the hair there was a trapdoor that led to the least true version of me. Now there was only one version. On the PCT I had no choice but to inhabit it entirely, to show my grubby face to the whole wide world.O

Dick looked from one detective to the other, perplexed. “You guys working on this murder case?” he asked. “Nope, that’s homicide, baby,” Grave Digger said. “Me and Ed are trying to find out who incited the riot.” Dick’s hysterical outburst of laughter seemed odd indeed from so cynical a man. “Man, that’s how you get dandruff,” he said. Interlude Good people, your food is digested by various juices in the stomach. There is a stomach juice for everything you eat. There is a juice for meat and a juice for potatoes. There is a juice for chitterlings and a juice for sweet potato pie. There is a juice for buttermilk and a juice for hopping John. But sometimes it happens these juices get mixed up and the wrong juice is applied to the wrong food. Now you might eat corn on the cob which has just been taken out of the pot and it’s so hot you burn your tongue. Well, your mouth gets mixed up and sends the wrong signal to your stomach. And your stomach hauls off and lets go with the juice for cayenne pepper. Suddenly you got an upset stomach and the hot corn goes to your head. It causes a burning fever and your temperature rises. Your head gets so hot it causes the corn to begin popping. And the popped corn comes through your skull and gets mixed up with your hair. And that’s how you get dandruff. Dusty Fletcher at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Harlem

In the middle of May an L.A. cop stopped a black man named Leonard Deadwyler for speeding through Watts. He stuck his gun in the driver's-side window — 'to attrack the driver's attention,' he later testified. He also claimed the car suddenly lurched forward, causing his gun to discharge. Leonard Deadwyler slumped into the lap of his wife and muttered his last words — 'But she's having a baby' — as his two-year-old son looked on from the backseat. He had been speeding her to the nearest hospital, miles away; there was no hospital in Watts — an area twice the size of Manhattan.

We don’t have drug dealers on the corners anymore. I can’t remember the last time someone was shot on this block. My churchgoers can come and go in peace.” “When there isn’t a curfew. Pastor, this isn’t peace. This is order.

Then they get to Mississippi and Ella pauses because Mama sometimes talked about Mississippi and Ella imagines warmth and mosquitoes and tallgrass, haze more than smoke and lounging on cars with the smell of weed making a blanket and somebody’s blasting Motown music out the open doors of their beat-up four-door and everybody is everybody’s cousin and barbecue sauce is suddenly on people’s fingers and bellies bulge with plenty. Maybe Mama didn’t say all those things when she said the word “Mississippi.” Maybe she didn’t mention the mosquitoes or the music. But it was the only time Ella ever saw her not look like she was made of iron.

I am the locusts, and the frogs, and the river of blood.

I am The Black Book. Between my top and my bottom, my right and my left, I hold what I have seen, what I have done, and what I have thought. I am everything I have hated: labor without harvest; death without honor; life without land or law. I am a black woman holding a white child in her arms singing to her own baby lying unattended in the grass. I am all the ways I have failed: I am the black slave owner, the buyer of Golden Peacock Bleach Crème and Dr. Palmer’s Skin Whitener, the self- hating player of the dozens; I am my own nigger joke. I am all the ways I survived: I am tun-mush, hoecake cooked on a hoe; I am Fourteen black jockeys winning the Kentucky Derby. I am the creator of hundreds of patented inventions; I am Lafitte the pirate and Marie Laveau. I am Bessie Smith winning a roller-skating contest; I am quilts and ironwork, fine carpentry and lace. I am the wars I fought, the gold I mined, The horses I broke, the trails I blazed. I am all the things I have seen: The New York Caucasian newspaper, the scarred back of Gordon the slave, the Draft Riots, darky tunes, and mer- chants distorting my face to sell thread, soap, shoe polish coconut. And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing. I am the sound of my own voice singing “Sangaree.” I am ring-shouts, and blues, ragtime and gospels. I am mojo, voodoo, and gold earrings. I am not complete here; there is much more, but there is no more time and no more space . . . and I have journeys to take, ships to name, and crews.

Faced with the collapse of the mainstream culture’s moral authority but lacking the power to change it, many baby boomers either raged in anarchistic riots or tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.

white men never hesitated to find their pleasure with Negro women. Before the Civil War, Southern slave owners kept their white women on pedestals, hidden away from the slaves; they made those women icons to white purity and the Southern way of life. But such veneration came with a cost. Women on pedestals tended to be frosty in bed, so the white man had his way with the Negro women and girls. Southern white boys crossed the threshold into manhood with a romp with a woman slave, who refused at the risk of a whipping, or worse. Even the white overseer could help himself whenever the urge arose, and it arose often, and all those mulatto babies were the result. But then the Union triumphed and the slaves were freed. Mingled with the Southern white man’s fury at the destruction of his way of life was this fear: what sort of retribution might the “black buck” now exact on white women? Negro men were now free to do to the white men’s beloved wives and daughters what the white men had done to the Negro women. Great vigilance was required to prevent such abominations. After all, how many rapes began with just a smile?

She gets to the church, and it stands out like a single, manicured toenail in a gangrenous foot.