Body-Ody-Ody-Ody...
She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!
Janie from Their Eyes were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston wrote this novel in seven weeks while in Haiti
Their Eyes Were Watching God
A time traveling black woman who breaks all the rules...
“How many iambs to be a real human girl?/ Which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart? / If I know of Ovid may I keep my children?”
Eve L. Ewing on Phyllis Wheatley
Child prodigy from West Africa who uses tone and elegaic poems to critique and challenge white supremacist attitudes during the 18th century
Phyllis Wheatley
Who said: “Blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
An apocalyptical event seems to kill everyone in Manhattan in 1920. Is he the last man on earth?
Du Bois's short story "The Comet"
“They’re my birthmark,” I said. “I yam what I am!”
Ellison's unnamed narrator in Invisible Man
“…she listened for the holes—the things the fugitives did not say; the questions they did not ask. Listened too for the unnamed, unmentioned people left behind.”
Morrison
The Sunken Place is also a metaphor for the subversive, coded, resistant acts of survival and freedom. Name an author who uses the underground the theorize alternative routes to freedom.
Brenyah, Du Bois, Ellison, Jacobs
“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”
An amusement park for social justice gone completely wrong...
Zimmerland, Adjei Brenyah
"I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running--from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much."
Sethe, Toni Morrison's Beloved
Hurston allows even the most powerless characters to become "lord of sounds" and language in this novel...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
“For all of us/ This instant and this triumph/ We were never meant to survive.”
Audre Lorde, Litany for Survival
When he told me that I was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing; that I was nothing but a slave, whose will must and should surrender to his, never before had my puny arm felt half so strong. (Chapter III)
Harriet Jacobs
Friday Black
A blueprint carrying bluesman who gives one of our narrators some motherwit advice...
Peter Wheatstraw
Who says: "This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery."
Saidiya Hartman
“He told me, if I would be happy, I must lay out no plans for the future. He said, if I behaved myself properly, he would take care of me. Indeed, he advised me to complete thoughtlessness of the future, and taught me to depend solely upon him for happiness. He seemed to see fully the pressing necessity of setting aside my intellectual nature, in order to contentment in slavery. But in spite of him, and even in spite of myself, I continued to think, and to think about the injustice of my enslavement, and the means of escape.”
Frederick DOuglass
“I couldn't really let her come all the way back. I couldn't let her return to what she was, I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole.”
Octavia Butler
The epic quarantine: man hides in hole to avoid a plague of antiblackness
Ellison's narrator in Invisible Man
None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things. Her brothers had known, but it scared them; Grandma knew, but it saddened her. None could appreciate the safety of ghost company.
Denver (Beloved)
In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you!
Baby Suggs, preacher (Toni Morrison, Beloved)
“The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.”
Claudia Rankine, Citizen