86
" All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave. Corrine was no different, and it was why, relentless as she was against slavery, she could so casually condemn me to the hole, condemn Georgie Parks to death, and mock an outrage put upon Sophia. "
― Ta-Nehisi Coates , The Water Dancer
89
" I sat down on a patch of dry grass just beyond the tents, where I could still hear my people singing in the distance. I was reeling from the day—Kessiah, the memories of Thena and Big John, the arguments and ideas about women, children, labor, land, family, and wealth. It occurred to me that an examination of the Task revealed not just those evils particular to Virginia, to my old world, but the great need for a new one entirely. Slavery was the root of all struggle. For it was said that the factories enslaved the hands of children, and that child-bearing enslaved the bodies of women, and that rum enslaved the souls of men. In that moment I understood, from that whirlwind of ideas, that this secret war was waged against something more than the Taskmasters of Virginia, that we sought not merely to improve the world, but to remake it. "
― Ta-Nehisi Coates , The Water Dancer
90
" Then, thinking of my old home with Thena and all my days there, and what it had been to me through all those years, I squeezed again and the blue tendrils snatched us up, and this time, when they released us, we found ourselves right back there on the Street, and as the fog retreated, the last image we had was of a woman water dancing, a jar on her head, dancing away from us until, with the most incredible grace, she angled her head so that the jar slid down, and reaching up she caught the jar by the neck, laughed, drank from it, and offered it up to someone unseen as she faded away. "
― Ta-Nehisi Coates , The Water Dancer
97
" And there was never a need to tell me any story twice, because if you told me that Hank Powers cried for three hours when his daughter was born, I remembered, and if you told me that Lucille Simms made a new dress out of her mother’s work clothes for Christmas, I remembered, and if you spoke of that time Johnny Blackwell pulled a knife on his brother, I remembered, and if you told me all the ancestors of Horace Collins, and where in Elm County they were born, I remembered, and if Jane Jackson recited all her generations, her mother, her mother’s mother, and every mother stretching all the way to the edge of the Atlantic, I remembered "
― Ta-Nehisi Coates , The Water Dancer