Notes of a Native Son quotes about family & inheritance

This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped.

He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine.

It is not simply the relationship of oppressed to oppressor, of master to slave, nor is it motivated merely by hatred; it is also, literally and morally, a blood relationship, perhaps the most profound reality of the American experience, and we cannot begin to unlock it until we accept how very much it contains of the force and anguish and terror of love.

On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born.

He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm.

I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.

One wonders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore.

For a tradition expresses, after all, nothing more than the long and painful experience of a people; it comes out of the battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more simply, out of their struggle to survive.

On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.

It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas.