Rambling Reader

“In the center of all these transformations is the fugitive slave. Winning her emancipation singly, in groups and en masse, stealing through dark swamps and across busy roads, dodging the slave catchers and outwitting police patrols, she moves unseen on the edges of history, changing it inexorably with her flight. To find herself, she must steal and abolish white property, must abolish herself-as-property. She strikes fear into the heart of white society because she reveals just how flimsy their regimes of property, power, and domination can be in the face of her jailbreak for freedom. This specter of slaves freeing themselves is American history’s first image of Black looters.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“The sun found over there a single small window to dazzle - - just as I imagined God, if He existed, might find in a whole crowd only one soul turned at the right angle to reflect his glory.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“No one respected them for their labor in a country where the idea of honorable poverty had vanished.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“Z is for zealotry: national pride like an infinite zipline, hyperdrive, the fastest way down.”
― Joshua Bennett, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019