" One girl can stand in for any of them, can serve as the placeholder for the story, recount the history from the beginning, convey the knowledge of freedom disguised as jargon an nonsense. Few understand them, studied them like they are worth something, realized their inherent value. If you listen closely, you can hear the whole world in a bent note, a throwaway lyric, a singular thread of the collective utterance. Everything from the first ship to the young woman found hanging in herself. Marvel at their capacity to inhabit every woman's grief as their own. All these stories ever told rush from her opened mouth. A tome of philosophy in a moan "

― Saidiya Hartman , Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals