Important Quotations Explained
1. “I's
big and black and I say 'Yes, suh' as loudly as any burrhead when
it's convenient, but I'm still the king down here. . . . The only
ones I even pretend to please are big white folk, and even those
I control more than they control me. . . . That's my life, telling
white folk how to think about the things I know about. . . . It's
a nasty deal and I don't always like it myself. . . . But I've made
my place in it and I'll have every Negro in the country hanging
on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am.”
2. “Our
white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you'd have to
crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn't white clear
through.”
3. .
. . the cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed
Negro . . . stared up at me from the floor, his face an enormous
grin, his single large black hand held palm up before his chest.
It was a bank, a piece of early Americana, the kind of bank which,
if a coin is placed in the hand and a lever pressed upon the back,
will raise its arm and flip the coin into the grinning mouth.
4. I
looked at Ras on his horse and at their handful of guns and recognized
the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly
complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had
brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where
I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the
Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their
confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity
of their American identity and mine. . . . And I knew that it was
better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others,
whether for Ras's or Jack's.
5. And
my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my
own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no
one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of
trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am
an invisible man.
