Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. When you slept, we were quiet; when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you; and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two-toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you.
The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well – to tell, to refine and tell.
One by fire, one by water, two of what he had so intensely loved gone, he thought. He couldn’t lose a third.
The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.
No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity. Otherwise we stand meekly behind Eris, hold Nemesis’s cloak, and genuflect at the feet of Thanatos.
That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and.
God’s generosity is nowhere better seen than in the gift of patience.
That whites not only had no patent on Christianity; they were often its obstacle. That Jesus had been freed from white religion, and he wanted these kids to know that they did not have to beg for respect; it was already in them, and they needed only to display it.
A poisoned silence floated through the rooms like a big fishnet that Violet alone slashed through with loud recriminations.
Difficult to “move on” from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.
It was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself?
Thank God for life,” True Belle said, “and thank life for death.
The Morgans always seemed to be having a second conversation – an unheard dialogue right next to the one they spoke aloud.
I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between bu the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running – from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much. Now sit down and eat with us or leave us be.
For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.
Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.
Whatever’s burning in me is mine.
The one set of plans she had made – getting away from Sweet Home – went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.
You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.