Six Acres And A Third Quotes

My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime. That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister. And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you. When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed. When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so. She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true. We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma. We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong. But you can’t make Sima agree with you. It’s true. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it. Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.

present counties of Clare, Galway, and Mayo, whence came the family name, in a contraction of Connaught-Galway to Connelly, Conly, Cory, Coddy, Coidy, and, finally, "Cod " Y• All this almost makes sense. However, it is only one of the legends Mrs. Wetmore offers up as fact in her book, despite her disclaimer in the preface that "embarrassed with riches of fact, I have had no thought of fiction." For the truth about William Cody's lineage, we must turn to Don Russell's authoritative biography, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Russell's research was thorough and exemplary; the notes for his book in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, are proof of that. According to Russell, "Buffalo Bill's most remote definitely known ancestor was one Philip, whose surname appears in various surviving records as Legody, Lagody, McCody, Mocody, Micody ... as well as Codie, Gody, Coady, and Cody." Russell traces Philip to Philippe Le Caude of the Isle of Jersey, who married Marthe Le Brocq of Guernsey in the parish of St. Brelades, Isle of Jersey, on September 15, 1692. Although the family names are French, the Channel Islands have been British possessions since the Middle Ages. No Irish or Spanish in sight; just good English stock. The Cody Family Association's book The Descendants of Philip and Martha Cody carries the line down to the present day. Buffalo Bill was sixth in descent from Philip. Philip and Martha purchased a home in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1698, and occupied it for twenty-five years, farming six acres of adjacent land. In 1720 Philip bought land in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and he and his family moved there, probably in 1722 or 1723. When he died in 1743, his will was probated under the name of Coady. The spelling of the family name had stabilized by the time Bill's father, Isaac, the son of Philip and Lydia Martin Cody, was born on September 15, 1811, in Toronto Township, Peel County, Upper Canada. It is Lydia Martin Cody who may have been responsible for the report of an Irish king in the family genealogy; she boasted that her ancestors were of Irish royal birth. When Isaac Cody was seventeen years old, his family moved to a farm near Cleveland, Ohio, in the vicinity of what is today Eighty-third Street and Euclid Avenue. That move would ultimately embroil William Cody in a lawsuit many years later, one of several suits he was destined to lose. Six years after arriving in Ohio, Isaac married Martha Miranda

The United States has lost one-third of its topsoil since colonial times—so much damage in such a short history. Six to seven billion tons of eroded soil, about 85 percent, are directly attributable to livestock grazing and unsustainable methods of farming feed crops for cattle. In 1988, more than 1.5 million acres in Colorado alone were damaged by wind erosion during the worst drought and heat wave since the 1950s.

They pulled up to 195 Madison Street - a tall narrow six-story redbrick and limestone-trimmed tenement house indistinguishable from all the tenement houses on all the other streets of tenements. The bars and ladders of a fire escape ran up the left side of the building; sooty stone scrolls, shields, and flowers framed the second- and third-story windows. This was the place where they had to live? Two blocks from the commercial madness of East Broadway; two blocks from the filthy snout of the East River, smelling of fish, ships, and garbage; three blocks from the brain-rattling racket of the elevated train; three blocks from the playground of the Henry Street Settlement; practically in the shadow of the construction side of the twin-towered Manhattan Bridge. Every three blocks they passed more people than the entire population of Rakov. Half a million Jews packed the one and a half square miles of the Lower East Side in 1909; 702 people per acre in the densest acres. It was one of the most crowded places on earth, and all of them seemed to be swarming outdoors on the June afternoon that Gishe Sore and her family arrived. Aside from the crisscross steel girders of the Manhattan Bridge at the end of the street, it was all tenement houses as far as she could see. Tenements and bodies. In every room of every building, bodies fought for a ray of light and a sip of air. Bodies slept four to a bed and on two chairs pushed together; bodies sat hunched over sewing machines in parlors and sunless back bedrooms and at kitchen tables heaped with cloth and thread; bodies ate, slept, woke, and cleared out for the next shift of bodies to cycle through. Toilets in the hall or in courtyard outhouses; windows opening, if they opened at all, onto fetid air shafts; no privacy; no escape from the racket and smell of neighbors; no relief from summer heat or blasting winter furnaces. This was the place her American children had brought them to live?

The death toll approached five hundred. No one could be sure how many had been lost in collapsed buildings that later burned. Fires had razed over 2,800 acres, wiping out 490 city blocks and 250,000 dwellings. They had destroyed six times as much land and property as the London fire of 1666. Even the Chicago fire of 1871 was but two thirds the size.