If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.
Say it, please, she urged. Please. And hurry. Hurry. I’ve got things to do.
You have to understand that, Lord. You said, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and harm them not.” Did you forget? Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sit on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I’ve seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God.
And I believe our sorrow was the more intense because nobody else seemed to share it. They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, “Poor little girl,” or “Poor baby,” but there was only head-wagging where those words should have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils.
He wanted her in that room with him giving him the balance he was losing, the ballast and counterweight to the stone of sorrow New York City had given him.
Her garden was not Eden; it was so much more than that.
There was nobody but me to take care of me so I invented myself, toughened myself.
Her eyes, fixed on the window, are so expressionless he is not sure she will know who he is. There is too much light here in this room. Things look sold.
Beloved so agitated she behaved like a two-year-old.
There is a loneliness that can be rocked. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own.
Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon – everything belonged to the men who had the guns.
What solicited my attention was whether the cultural associations of jazz were as important to Cardinal’s “possession” as were its intellectual foundations. I was interested, as I had been... in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them. In fact I had started, casually like a game, keeping a file of such instances.
They believe they know before the music does what their hands, their feet are to do, but that illusion is the music’s secret drive: the control it tricks them into believing is theirs; the anticipation it anticipates.
Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.
The only way to change the order, she thought, was not to do something differently, but to do a different thing.
They stopped me from getting us there, but they didn’t stop you from getting here. Ha ha.
Own things. And let the things you own own other things.
Here freedom was not entertainment, like a carnival or a hoedown that you can count on once a year. Nor was it the table droppings from the entitled. Here freedom was a test administered by the natural world that a man had to take for himself every day. And if he passed enough tests long enough, he was king.
One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day.
Now I can look at things again because she’s here to see them too.