MaryAnne

“One day a young man stood at the foot of Shackamaxon Street in Philadelphia, sugar town, 1882. Folded into his vest, a letter of reference. He had an idea that involved a railroad ticket and the millions of dead buffalo out west. If he could get those bones into railroad cars and ship them to Philadelphia, they could be heated in a sealed vessel at 700 degrees Celsius, which was 1292 degrees Fahrenheit, not easy to imagine. The super-heating would drive off the organic matter in the bones, leaving activated carbon, composed of tricalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and carbon. Bone charcoal. Bone black. Ivory black. Animal charcoal. Abaiser. Pigment black 9. Bone char. Carbo animalis. Buffalo black. This substance could be used to refine crude raw sugar processed from sugarcane, slave sugar, although of course the slave trade had been abolished, then as now, but there still were enslaved people, then as now. Bone char worked better than bull’s blood or egg whites or any other substance to bleach the sugar white. And the bones! The bones were everywhere, he’d heard, littering the ground, so thick that a farmer couldn’t plow without stacking them beside the fields. He went into”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“As boys they were husky. As men they are bulky. They loom like monoliths. They are chainsaw art. As Diz and Gusty lumbered across the yard, strong bulwark guts atop leg beams, they talked. Their thin exquisite lips barely moved. Their handsome wind-whipped faces were impassive in the shadow of billed caps. They had survived their father by sticking together. They never discussed the past. To speak about the way their father, Sport, had treated them would be like grabbing an electric fence. (220)”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
― Maya Angelou