The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball's establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester house, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.

The idea of having several days, never mind weeks or months, to relocate to a climate that was better for your lungs or gout, or to have an extra home in which to practice bridge strategies and indolence, was unimaginable to all but the most wealthy Bostonians, who were inbred and warped. Their idea of vacation was to go north, to a cold dark place, where they would not speak to their families but instead sit in silence, drink martinis, looking out over bodies of water that you would never, EVER go into. Because the waters of Maine are made of hate and want to kill you.

When black blood was money, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.

High-minded idiocy pitted against the power of coin.

The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings.

How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured.