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Quote by Brit Bennett

“The twins had always seemed both blessed and cursed; they'd inherited, from their mother, the legacy of an entire town, and from their father, a legacy hollowed by loss. Four Vignes boys, all dead by thirty. The eldest collapsed in a chain gang from heatstroke; the second gassed in a Belgian trench; the third stabbed in a bar fight; and the youngest, Leon Vignes, lynched twice, the first time at home while his twin girls watched through a crack in the closet door, hands clamped over each other's mouths until their palms were misted with spit.”

Quote by Brit Bennett

Work

The Vanishing Half

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Brit Bennett

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“Three days later when his body was found they wanted to bury him in Mississippi. I wanted him home in Chicago. I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy. I wanted Emmett's death to be the last death. I wanted Emmett's death to kill American innocence. I wanted Emmett's death to be not only the death of my boy but the death of innocence. I wanted Mississippi, I wanted America, to give us justice. And I prayed that I would live long enough to see it.”

“The Run" It’s the middle of the day, I know some are home, and they see and hear the wrong that’s going on. A Black man is being hunted on their street, That’s why no one calls in help for me. I hear the shots, three times I’m struck. I try and try, but I can’t get up. My head is lifted toward the sky, No pain, I’m riding the runner’s high.”

“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”