Days ago I was with my family, in my home. Now you tell me all is lost. Tell no one who I am? That's the way to survive. Well, I don't want to survive. I want to live.
You let yourself be overcome by sorrow. You will drown in it.
My back is thick with scars from protesting my freedom.
I ain't felt the end of a lash in 'mo years than I cain recall. I ain't worked a field, neither. Where once I served, now I have others servin' me. The cost to my current existence be Massa Shaw...broadcasting his affections and me enjoyin' the pantomime of his fidelity. If that what keep me from the cotton pickin' niggers.
I knowed what it like to be the object of Massa's predilections and peculiarities. A lusty visit in the night, or a visitation with the whip.
All I ask is end my life. Take my body to the margin of the swamp. Take me by the throat. Hold me low in the water until I's still 'n without life. Bury me in a lonely place of dyin'.
Dark times is behind us. Clean livin' 'n prayer done lifted the plague. As thick 'n white as New England snow. 'N now my niggers is returned to me.
Laws change, Epps. Universal truths though are constant. It is a fact, a plain and simple fact that what is true and right is true and right for all. White and black alike.
These niggers are human beings. If they are allowed to claim no higher than brute animals, you and men like you will have to answer for it. There's an ill, Mr. Epps, a fearful ill, resting upon this nation, and there will be a day of reckoning yet.