" I felt my shoulders squaring. I wasn’t twelve years old anymore. I was a Birch in Birchville. My brown-skinned son would be a Birch in Birchville, too, yet he would be nothing but that ugly word to trash like Cody Mack. He could not live in the town as I knew it. He would not live in the South or even America as I knew it. I hadn’t truly understood how deep and old and dangerous this was, until tonight. We couldn’t hide up in our house and wait for them to choose. This was a war. An old, old war that had started before I was born and would likely not be finished in my lifetime, but I had to fight it. I was going to have to learn to fight it. "

― Joshilyn Jackson , The Almost Sisters