There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that’s saying a heap.
She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.
Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.
If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.
Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?
The things that help you sleep all the way through it. Back-breaking labor might do it; or liquor. Surely a body – friendly if not familiar – lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuisance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor disgusts, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet.
When I woke up I reminded myself that freedom is never free. You have to fight for it. Work for it and make sure you are able to handle it. Now.
But stars can explode, disappear. Besides, what we see when we look at them may no longer be there. Some could have died thousands of years ago and we’re just now getting their light. Old information looking like news.
Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.
Whitefolks said he was a witch doctor, but they said that so they wouldn’t have to say he was smart. A hunter’s hunter that’s what he was. Smart as they come. Taught me two lessons I lived by all my life. One was the secret of kindness from white people –they had to pity a thing before they could like it. The other – oh well, I forgot it.” Joe Trace.
All he did from freshman year through sophomore was react – sneer, laugh, dismiss, find fault, demean – a young man’s version of critical thinking.
Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn’t read.
It is this rattling I believe that affects the second point: our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?
The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway.
The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.
Grownups don’t pay it much attention because they can’t imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence.
A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to. Don’t matter. You find one, stay there. You see a scary one, make tracks.
And for a reason he still did not understand, he began to cry. Love plain, simple, and so fast it shattered him.
Write at the edges of the day.
Anything is better than the silence when she answered to hands gesturing and was indifferent to the movement of lips. When she saw every little thing and colors leaped smoldering into view. She will forgo the most violent of sunsets, stars as fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved.