Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. IT is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress making and who knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. "Slavery" is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a word in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back in to the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She cam imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world - which is really the only world she can ever know - ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night.
( Ta-Nehisi Coates )
[ Between the World and Me ]
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