Am I not a Man…

“I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”

“He wants me to live white” #MulattoWomanProblems

One of my favorite passages from Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone

“Debt Chauffeur, that’s my name for him now, wants to marry me. He asked me down on bended knee, and I would have been honored – except he wants us to live in London, and he wants me to live white. I crowed at that. I laughed so hard and not a tear came. He couldn’t understand it. I don’t often think on how white I look; it’s always been a question of how colored I feel, and I feel plenty colored. He said that no one in London will know that I’m supposed to be colored. And I said I am colored, colored black, the way I talk, the way I cook, the way I do most everything, and he said but you don’t have to be. ”

― Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone: A Novel