Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

“James Baldwin lived in this house for more than twenty-five years, and all that was left were half a dozen pink teacups and turquoise saucers buried by the house's rear wall, orange trees that were heavy with fruit, but the fruit was bitter and sharp to the taste. We see Baldwin's name in connection to the present condition more often than we see Faulkner's, Whitman's, or Thoreau's. We can visit houses and places where they lived and imagine how their geography shaped the authors and our collective vocabulary. By next year, Baldwin's house will just be another private memory for those who knew it.”
― Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

“If I knew anything about being black in America it was that nothing was guaranteed, you couldn’t count on anything, and all that was certain for most of us was a black death. In my mind, a black death was a slow death, the accumulation of insults, injuries, neglect, second-rate health care, high blood pressure, and stress, no time for self-care, no time to sigh, and, in the end, the inevitable, the erasing of memory. I wanted to write against this, and so I was writing a history of the people I did not want to forget. And I loved it; nothing else mattered, because I was remembering, I was staving off death.”
― Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race