Black privilege is the hung elephant swinging in the room.
Thank you for buying this book. Or, if my publisher’s research analytics are correct, thank you, Aunts of America, for buying this for your niece you don’t know that well but really want to connect with more.
I take these pills to make me thin
I dye my hair and cut my skin
I try everything to make them see me
But all they see is someone that’s not me
Killing was easier than I thought it could be, and a lot more rewarding. I finally feel as if I’ve done something important, something that deserves real attention.
I almost forgot what it feels like to be loved because I loved to be Liked.
I approached the witness stand with a warm and welcoming smile. This, of course, belied my true intent, which was to destroy the woman who sat there with her eyes fixed on me.
The storm is coming but I don’t mind.
People are dying, I close my blinds.
Johnny Merton was playing with me, and we both knew it. It was a fun game for him. He was doing endless years for crimes ranging from murder to extortion to excessive litigation. He had a lot of time on his hands.
For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.
Stephen Torres was meeting with a client at his law office, in downtown Albuquerque, on April 12, 2011, when he received a call from a neighbor, who told him that police officers were aiming rifles at his house. He left work and drove to his home, in a middle-class suburb with a view of the mountains. There were more than forty police vehicles on his street.
“The crime,” as detectives would later tell the newspapers, was “one of the most gruesome in the annals of the New Orleans police.”
I take a pill to help me through the day
I stay inside until I feel okay
The funeral is supposed to be a quiet affair, for the deceased had no friends. But words are water in Amsterdam, they flood your ears and set the rot, and the church’s east corner is crowded.
For as long as I can remember, I remember fear.
None of the merry-go-rounds seem to work anymore. There is a Holiday Inn across from the coroner’s office. And Lorenzo Jones is our mayor.
Y’all don’t know nothing ‘bout a scorned, burnt body.
They said I must die. They said that I stole the breath from men, and now they must steal mine.
You heard me right: Come in. No, you won’t disturb a soul in this locker room. They’re all lost in that place most folks go maybe once or twice in a lifetime, when their mamas or daddies die or their children are born, a place they don’t go nearly as often as they should. Trust me, these boys will never know you’re here.
I am a coward.
I wanted to be heroic and I pretended I was. I have always been good at pretending.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—began, so far as I can know or tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
I feel your knife as it goes right in
Cut to my core but I’m not bleeding
[Acknowledgments] We would like to thank everyone who helped us, or, at least, who did not slow us down too much.
Scientific revolutions, almost by definition, defy common sense. If all our common-sense notions about the universe were correct, then science would have solved the secrets of the universe thousands of years ago.