" I thought he throw us in the scullery fire for trying to get back to Dahomey. This, this nothing, boy. You never seen a bit of blood?'

Of course I had. We had lived in blood for years, my entire life. But something about that evening - the gleaming beauty of the master's house, the refinements, the lazy elegance - made feel a profound, unsettling sense of despair. It was not only William's mutilation that day, knowing his head stared out over the fields even now, in the darkness. What I felt at that moment, though I then lacked the language for it, was the raw, violent injustice of it all. "

― Esi Edugyan , Washington Black