| Acknowledgments | |
| Glossary | |
| Introduction: "I think this anthropology is just another way to call me a nigger." | |
| A Nation Within a Nation | |
| "Black men have no country, but they are a country in their hearts." | |
| "We are a nation primarily because we think we are a nation." | 3 |
| "Sometimes I wonder if there are any other Americans besides us." | 10 |
| "That man has got his country and we are our country." | 14 |
| The Legacy of Slavery | |
| "I'm not saying 'Yessir' to no damn cracker." | |
| "When you don't know when you have been spit on, it does not matter too much what else you think you know." | 27 |
| "In many ways I was more of a slave than most of my black ancestors." | 39 |
| "Many people say our people are unpredictable." | 51 |
| "There is nothing on this earth as low and lazy and cowardly as a cracker." | 59 |
| "I am a hard woman because I have had a hard time out here." | 64 |
| The Many Shades of Black | |
| "Too many blackfolks are fools about color and hair." | |
| "He looks as white as any white person, but you'd better not tell him that unless you are ready to go to war." | 73 |
| "One reason the whole thing is so hard to deal with is that nobody really talks about it." | 76 |
| "It's sex and color that present the most difficulty, right?" | 83 |
| "I don't trust anybody who would deny their color like that." | 87 |
| "I think that is rotten of them to lie to a blind man like that!" | 91 |
| The Mojo and the Sayso | |
| "The business of white men is to rule." | |
| "The white man must pretend to know more than he does, but we must always show less than we know." | 95 |
| "Whitefolks are how folks and blackfolks are what folks." | 102 |
| "The biggest difference between us and white people is that we know when we are playing." | 105 |
| "There are two kinds of whitefolks. A few live like they want to and the rest try to live like their big boss leaders." | 109 |
| "The power to do one thing is never the power to do all things." | 114 |
| The Welfare Siege | |
| "You cannot walk the streets without running into something bad." | |
| "We need to get up, not just get over." | 121 |
| "These whitefolks is evermore giving people things they cannot use or do not want." | 127 |
| "I thank God that I don't need anything from the white man." | 130 |
| "You can't just take anything this man hands out, because he has a hundred different kinds of chains." | 132 |
| "You push enough for the white man and you get a Cadillac out of his small change." | 134 |
| Sex and Work | |
| "Hard work don't have a thing between its legs." | |
| "When you lose control of your body, you have just about lost all you have in this world!" | 143 |
| "One thing about Cal'donia, if she don't want you, you are out of luck because that thing between her legs is hers and hers alone." | 157 |
| "He was a man and I was a woman, so we didn't neither of us have to raise the other." | 166 |
| "I can handle black men; what I can't handle is this prejudice." | 170 |
| Turn | |
| "I'm twenty-four, but sometimes I feel much older because the things I believe in are the old ways." | |
| "Christ warned us by his life and death, so who am I that I should not warn my daughter by my life?" | 179 |
| "If you teach your children to be fair and honest only some of the time and only to some people, you are really telling them that the truth is unimportant." | 183 |
| "I feel like something heavy just rolled off my chest." | 188 |
| "In high school they told me that it was the wonderful world of work and my father told me, 'Shug, it's a bitch out there.'" | 190 |
| "A junkie generally has to mess up the people he can - that means his mother or his sisters or his brothers." | 194 |
| "My daughter listens to me sometimes, but I listened to my mother all the time." | 200 |
| "Now, how is having a lot of fatherless children for the white man to half support going to help us?" | 204 |
| "I always wanted my mother to be proud of me, but I never really turned out to be nothin'." | 206 |
| More Than Mere Survival | |
| "You got to live it the best you know how." | |
| "All these doctors want to do is cut you or starve you." | 219 |
| "Right now, every day is just something you got to get through." | 223 |
| "I'm no respecter of churches in the same way that the Lord is no respecter of persons." | 227 |
| "God is the baddest ass in the firmament!" | 230 |
| "Some people are the horse shit of the earth." | 236 |
| "A faithful person means more than anything else in the world!" | 256 |
| "I have learned to stop feeling sorry for myself, I think." | 267 |
