Miss Theenie stood watching. One by one, her children had left her and gone up north. Sam and Cleve to Ohio. Josie to Syracuse. Irene to Milwaukee. Now the man Miss Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the first place was taking her away, too. Miss Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good. Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter's family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car.
"May the Lord be the first one in the car," she prayed, "and the last out."

When the time had come, Ida Mae and little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded into a brother-in-law's truck, and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae's husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottomland.

(Wilkerson, 2010, p.4).

'in Lafcadio Hearn's travel narrative Two Years in the French West Indies in 1889. Hearn keeps asking what the Creole word means: he is told, variously, that it is a three-legged horse, a hanged man, a five-foot tall dog, or a fourteen-foot tall woman.'

Roger Luckhurst (2015).

Nasreen gathered the food quickly, but she, too, noticed a series of odd smells carried into the house by the wind. 'At first, it smelled bad, like garbage,' she said. 'And then it was a good smell, like sweet apples. Then like eggs.' Before she went downstairs, she happened to check on a caged partridge that her father kept in the house. 'The bird was dying,' she said. 'It was on its side.' She looked out the window. 'It was very quiet, but the animals were dying. The sheep and goats were dying.' Nasreen ran to the cellar. 'I told everybody there was something wrong. There was something wrong with the air.'

from here

Social grants are, in many senses, the glue holding families and communities together

Chris Webb on the social grants crisis in South Africa

oceans atop bus shelters

great plains on lamp posts

"Making Kaşar in Kars"

coins a statement of power indeed

I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord, but before he leaves that point will he at the next stage of the Bill bring forward some evidence from satisfied pubco tenants about how wonderful their relationship is with Enterprise Inns or Punch Taverns?

- Lord Snape* with a deserved burn for Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, pubco chum

Lords Hansard, 2nd December 2014, column 1289

* cash for influence yes