The River Between Us Versions of Reality Quotes

Mama feared that people were commencing to talk about Cass. She never told her visions outside the family. She said little or nothing in company. But people could see her up here, perched on the Devil's Backbone. Before the trees greened, they could see her plain, staring out at the river like a soul in torment. They called her moony. Mama feared they'd one day call her mad. (2.27)

I went cold to my core. All her visions looked back, sometimes to ages past. Now she'd whipped around and was looking ahead. And that was the April when we all feared the future. It was the spring of 1861, when all the news was bad, promising worse. (2.36)

"She is droll, that one," Delphine said.

"She sees things that ain't there."

"She has visions?" Delphine was interested at once. "She is a seeress?"

"I don't know about that," I said. "Mama's worried to death Cass will lose her mind."

"But it is a gift she has!" Delphine exclaimed.

"Not in these parts," I said, wondering what I'd blurt out next. (5.47-52)

Cass didn't find the time to mope and mourn now she had Calinda. Calinda was the sister Cass needed. I'd hugged her to me and wiped her nose. But she needed what I couldn't give. Her and Calinda spoke a language I was deaf to, a language of prophecies and cures, of visions and the medicines waiting out in the timber to heal the afflicted. They spoke in tongues foreign to me, even when they weren't speaking at all. (6.18)

In the deepest part of the night, I came awake to see the trundle empty and Cass over on the windowsill. Her face was silvery wet with moonlight. She stared at what wasn't there, and I saw in her slump that it was the old Cass come back, Cass having a fearful vision.

She was so silent that I don't know what woke me. But she was bent in agony. One hand clutched the other arm, and she rocked back and forth, gray with pain. (6.26-27)

"He's bad sick, you know," she said. "He is. I know things. Where do you think Cass gets it? She gets it from me. I want him back. Go get him." (9.22)

"To her, Noah is dead. She read it in the cards."

"Then she read them wrong," I said, clenching my chin like a fist.

"She read death in the cards," Delphine said as if I hadn't spoken. "She see the coffin come up the river." (13.40-42)

"Does your mama want Calinda to find a white man too?"

Delphine shrugged off that entire notion. "Mais non. Our Maman see early that Calinda has the gift of prophecy and is born with ancient secrets. Maman see that Calinda can make her own way in the world." (14.9-10)

"But if the South wins—"

She put up a thimbled hand to still me. "It will not. We lose the war. This year. Another year. I dream. I pretend, but it is in the cards. Calinda see it. Why deceive oneself? Her cards are never wrong." (14.21)

"Calinda was what they call a conjure woman, down yonder in New Orleans. She could tell your fortune, you know, and there'd have been a market for that in the more built-up areas. Cass had the gift too. It's what drawed them together, closer than sisters. But I suppose it was too late for Cass. I think she'd been wore out by her visions before Calinda come among us." (15.24)