Slavery

What my grandfather told me.

Slavery is not an undefined mass of flesh. It is a specific, individual, enslaved woman with a mind as active as your own, with a range of emotions as vast as yours, who enjoys fishing where the water swirls in a nearby river, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, who thinks her sister talks too much, who has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who is skilled at sewing dresses and knows deep inside that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. 

"Slavery" is this same woman born into a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world where those who make this claim hold this woman as a slave, hold her mother as a slave, her father as a slave, her daughter as a slave. And when this woman looks back over the generations, she sees nothing but slaves.

She can hope for something more. She can imagine a future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, her world ends�"for it is the only world she could ever know. For this woman, slavery is not a metaphor. It is damnation. It is the endless night. And the length of that night is most of our history.

You must never forget that we were slaves in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years, Black people were born into chains�"whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing else but chains.

By TA-NEHISI COATES Between the world and me

Author's Note

Thank you for taking the time to read:)