You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent. Good luck and God help the child.
What’s fair ain’t necessarily right.
She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her – and the humor with which to live it.
Adults do not talk to us – they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information.
In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.
Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.
Her color is a cross she will always carry.
They hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing Milkman, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them. Laughing too, hard, loud, and long. Really laughing, and he found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil, and were comfortable there – on the earth and on the place where he walked. And he did not limp.
How can I take crime shows seriously where the female detectives track killers in Louboutin heels?
But then Job was a man. Invisibility was intolerable to men. What complaint would a female Job dare to put forth? And if, having done so, and He deigned to remind her of how weak and ignorant she was, where was the news in that? What shocked Job into humility and renewed fidelity was the message a female Job would have known and heard every minute of her life.
Good for you. More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.
Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.
What you want to be when you grow up?” Thomas turned the knob with his left hand and opened the door. “A man,” he said and left.
They did not believe death was accidental – life might be, but death was deliberate.
At least she’s willing to figure it out, do something, risk something and take its measure. I risk nothing. I sit on a throne and identify signs of imperfection in others.
The sun and the moon shared the horizon in a distant friendship, each unfazed by the other.
It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.
We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.
Things got better but I still had to be careful. Very careful in how I raised her. I had to be strict, very strict. Lula Ann needed to learn how to behave, how to keep her head down and not to make trouble. I don’t care how many times she changes her name. Her color is a cross she will always carry. But it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not. Bride I’m scared.
From the beginning, his mother and Pilate had fought for his life, and he had never so much as made either of them a cup of tea.