Kindred

Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.

Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.

There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one. (p124)

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. (beginning of Prologue)

“He’s a fair man.”

I looked at him, startled.

“I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.”

I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.

Slavery was a long slow process of dulling. (p183)

"There're are worse things than being dead." (p253)

I got up to leave. There was nothing more to be said. He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused.

He didn’t look all right to me. “Has anyone gone for the doctor?”

“Marse Tom don’t hardly get Doc West for ague. He says all the doc knows is bleeding and blistering and purging and puking and making folks sicker than they was to start.”