"That's why I preach today. Do not do spite," he said. "Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps… - Isabel Wilkerson

They lived in big cities too distracted to care what the colored people did as long as they did it to themselves, and that was the greatest blessing of all.

He had been the one to set the course of their lives by migrating to New York before they were born. The parts of the city that black migrants could afford — Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Bronx — had been hard and forbidding places to raise children, especially for some of the trusting and untutored people from the small-town South. The migrants had been so relieved to have escaped Jim Crow that many underestimated or dared not think about the dangers in the big cities they were running to — the gangs, the guns, the drugs, the prostitution. They could not have fully anticipated the effects of all these things on children left unsupervised, parents off at work, no village of extended family to watch over them as might have been the case back in the South. Many migrants did not recognize the signs of trouble when they surfaced and so could not inoculate their children against them or intercede effectively when the outside world seeped into their lives.

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.