26 Quotes by Attica Locke

Criminality, once it touched black life, was a stain hard to remove.

It both saddened and infuriated him that he wore a badge that meant nothing to either woman, that justice and despondency were so inextricably intertwined that the former was often not worth the trouble of the latter.

They were not willing to cede an entire state to the hatred of a bunch of nut-scratching, tobacco-spitting crackers. Money allowed for that choice, sure it did. But money also demanded something of them, and the Mathewses were willing to give it. They built a colored school in Camilla, offered small-business loans to colored folks when they could, and dedicated their lives to public service, becoming teachers and country doctors and lawyers and agitators when the times called for it.

Wally’s and Keith’s lives revolved around the black folks they claimed to hate but couldn’t leave alone. It was, as his uncle Clayton would say, an obsession that weakened them, that enraged and eventually enslaved them within their own hearts...

His uncles adhered to those ancient rules of southern living, for they understood how easily a colored man’s general comportment could turn into a matter of life and death. Darren had always wanted to believe that theirs was the last generation to have to live that way, that change might trickle down from the White House. When in fact the opposite had proved to be true. In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself.

To see a Confederate flag flying outside someone’s home or in the back window of a pickup truck is about as accurate a warning system as a man could hope for, like the engine light coming on in your car a few miles before something may or may not blow up; it’s a caution before trouble starts, offering a clean window of time in which to make a run for it.

The law, she knew, is a narrow little box, and it takes only a single misstep to find yourself on the outside of it.

He had forgotten that the most elemental instinct in human nature is not hate but love, the former inextricably linked to the latter.

At the Sugar Oaks Plantation, there are lawn jockeys at attention on the clipped lawn in front of the clubhouse. They are not black so much as they are tan – not exactly white, but rather some reassuring shade of brown, the universal color of good service. They are meant as a reminder that somebody, somewhere, is working harder than you.