#slave

To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#slavery #freedom

I’ll let you see the door is open, so you know I’m open to the idea that you can leave anytime you want. So long as you are able to pick the lock on your handcuffs while you are blindfolded.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#captive #choice #decision #door #freedom

She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white. ↗

— Shannon Celebi

#colored #race #race-america #race-relations #racism

Debt Chauffeur, that's my name for him now, wants to marry me. He asked me down on bended knee, and I would have been honored - except he wants us to live in London, and he wants me to live white. I crowed at that. I laughed so hard and not a tear came. He couldn't understand it. I don't often think on how white I look; it's always been a question of how colored I feel, and I feel plenty colored. He said that no one in London will know that I'm supposed to be colored. And I said I am colored, colored black, the way I talk, the way I cook, the way I do most everything, and he said but you don't have to be. ↗

— Alice Randall

#born-into-slavery #marriage-proposal #mulatto #the-wind-done-gone #marriage

If you don't feel apologetic for slavery, if you don't feel apologetic for colonialism, if you feel proud of it then say that. ↗

— Jesse Jackson

#colonialism #feel #proud #say #slavery

Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. ↗

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

#darkened #dawn #enough #every #life

If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year. ↗

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

#during #go #his #jail #locked

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. ↗

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

#cabin #children #cold #comes #dawns

But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. ↗

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

#could #ear #entered #epoch #fifteenth

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away. ↗

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

#born #childhood #had #happy #happy childhood