Erin Davis

“I saw that just as the fields and its workers were the engine of everything, the house itself would have been lost without those who tasked within it.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“entire apparatus to disguise this weakness, to hide how prostrate they truly were. The tunnel, where I first entered the house, was the only entrance that the Tasked were allowed to use, and this was not only for the masters’ exaltation but to hide us, for the tunnel was but one of the many engineering marvels built into Lockless so as to make it appear powered by some imperceptible energy. There were dumbwaiters that made the sumptuous supper appear from nothing, levers that seemed to magically retrieve the right bottle of wine hidden deep in the manor’s bowels, cots in the sleeping quarters, drawn under the canopy bed, because those charged with emptying the chamber-pot must be hidden even more than the chamber-pot itself.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“and letting this accident become its own conclusion, seemed easier than making the decision himself,”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life