Status Updates From A Lesson Before Dying

They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened. Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, We, us, white folks all, have decided it's time for you to die, because this is the convenient date and time.

How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?

"You're a lady of quality," my aunt repeated.
"And a pretty young lady too," Miss Eloise said."That's for sure," Inez chipped in. "A pretty young lady. Good manners. Quality is what you have. Quality."

You know what I'm talking about, don't you? his eyes said. They were big brown eyes, the whites too reddish. You know, don't you? his eyes said again.
I looked back at him. My eyes would not dare answer him. But his eyes knew that my eyes knew.

He was the worst child in the school. He came from a large family—fourteen, fifteen: I don't know how many-and he had to fight for every crumb of food he got. At school he did the same. He fought if he played marbles, he fought if he played ball, he fought if he played hide-and-go-seek, he fought if he played hide-the-switch. In class he fought with those who sat in front of him, beside him, behind him.

I tried to decide just how I should respond to them. Whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be. I decided to wait and see how the conversation went. To show too much intelligence would have been an insult to them. To show a lack of intelligence would have been a greater insult to me.

Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

She turned her head slowly and looked directly at me. Her large, dark face showed all the pain she had gone through this day, this past weekend. No. The pain I saw in that face came from many years past.