"I thought of all the times I had heard 'But why didn't they fight back?' when slavery was discussed in my classes. I thought of the bell at plantations like the Whitney, which had been rung to tell the enslaved people to gather round and watch one of their loved ones being lashed until they bled. I thought of the rooms in Angola's Red Hat cell block, how the smallness of those spaces had closed in on me. The cramped cavern might have been where the lessons on first resistance had taken place in a person's earliest days of enslavement. Where spirits and bodies had been broken."
How the Word is passed by Clint Smith
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