The wonderful thing about writers like [James] Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless an… - Edward P. Jones

She went through her memory for the time, for the day, she and and her husband told him all about what he should and should not do. No goin out into them woods without Papa or me knowin about it. No steppin foot out this house without them free papers, not even to go to the well or the privy. Say your prayers every night...Pick the blueberries close to the ground, son. Them the sweetest, I find. If a white man say the trees can talk, can dance, you just say yes right along, that you done seen em do it plenty of times. Don't look them people in the eye. You see a white woman riding toward you, get way off the road and go stand behind a tree. The uglier the white woman, the farther you go and the broader the tree. But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don't go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there.

"(Her husband's departure ...) had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity.
From "Butterfly on F street

Calvin had long been uneasy in his own person and so lived to put everyone else at ease.