Carolina QuotesQuotations with a citation
I think it's part of my history. It's part of who I am. I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and so passionately but race matters to me. Racial equality matters very much to me, as does gender. There's something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.
We need to understand that so many slaves resisted. They fought. They freed themselves. They escaped. They worked in subversive ways. I mean, it was not a passive, victimized situation all the time.
It became part of my challenge: I wanted to do them justice and have their history all there. At the same time, I’m a novelist. I’m not a historian, I’m not a biographer. I had to serve the story first.
I used it as scaffolding. I followed the truth as close as I possibly could, but I also invented a lot to bring them alive on the page.