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21 " Those who love heroes must walk a stony road. "
― Greg Iles , The Bone Tree (Penn Cage #5)
22 " Wharlest Jackson used to ask: ‘How can we change the white man’s heart? How can we make him see that we’re all the same inside? "
23 " Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word. It’s how we respond that defines us. "
24 " What Kaiser most wanted was time and freedom to follow the leads he’d unearthed—to wherever they led, unhampered by oversight and regardless of consequences. J. Edgar Hoover might be long dead, but his paranoid ghost still haunted the halls of FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Already two men had died since Kaiser and his team had driven north from New Orleans to Vidalia, and more had died in the days before that. These deaths had not gone unnoticed in Washington, and by early this evening a few reporters at national newspapers had picked up on the violent doings in the backcountry of Louisiana. None had yet learned that Kaiser had designated the Double Eagle group a terrorist entity under the Patriot Act (which gave him unprecedented power to combat the survivors of the Klan offshoot), but someone soon would, and that would only increase the political pressure to quickly resolve events "
25 " The past is always with us, darling,” Tom went on. “Sometimes we carry it lightly, but other times it’s like dragging a wounded brother behind you. "
26 " Hannah Arendt had it right: evil is incomprehensibly banal. The existentialists went her one better: it’s also absurd, and terrifyingly so. "
27 " As I leave the DA's office building, the cold wind bring me wide awake. I trot down the steps through the shouting reporters without a word, turning left toward City Hall, which abuts the southeast face of the courthouse Just as I think I've cleared the feeding frenzy, someone catches hold of my arm. I whirl in anger, then find myself facing an elderly black woman huddling in a jacket. 'Yes, ma'am?' I say. 'How can I help you?'"Isobel Handley,' she says with a smile. 'I want to know when you're going to do something about the schools, Mayor. You got elected saying you were gonna fix 'em, but right now it's a crying shame how few children who go into the first grade make it through the twelfth for graduation. And you've been in office two whole years!'The reasons for this state of affairs are both simple and unimaginably complex, and I certainly don't have the resources to go through them on a cold sidewalk. Not today, anyway. But conversations like this one are the daily fare of a mayor.'I'm talking about the PUBLIC schools,' the woman goes an. "Not the private white schools where the only black kids are football players.' 'Yes, ma'am," I say hopelessly. 'I'm working as hard asI can on the issue, I promise you.''If your little girl wasn't in a private school, you'd work harder.''Mrs. Handley, I-''You don't have to explain, baby, I understand. But you take a stick to them selectmen and supervisors, if you have to. That's what they need. Sometimes I think the schools were better before integration. At least we learned the fundamentals, and we graduated knowing how to read.'There's no point trying to explain that I have no authority over the county supervisors or the state board of education. 'Sometimes I wish I could do exactly what you suggested, Mrs. Handley. Now, you'd better get out of this cold. And Merry Christmas to you.'At last she smiles. 'You too, Mayor. God bless. And don't pay these reporters no mind. "