The girl’s face looks greedy, haughty and very lazy. The cream-at-the-top-of-the-milkpail face of someone who will never work for anything; someone who picks up things lying on other people’s dressers and is not embarrassed when found out. It is the face of a sneak who glides over to your sink to rinse the fork you have laid by her plate. An inward face – whatever it sees is its own self. You are there, it says, because I am looking at you.
She opened the door, walked in and locked it tight behind her.
How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.
Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color.
I was happy, free in a way I had never been, ever. It was the oddest sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction, not a surfeit of pleasure or accomplishment. It was a purer delight, a rogue anticipation with certainty.
His sister was gutted, infertile, but not beaten. She could know the truth, accept it, and keep on quilting. Frank tried to sort out what else was troubling him and what to do about it.
Finally Milkman could take no more; he had to rest. At the next tree he sank down to the ground and put his head back on its bark. Let them laugh if they wanted to; he would not move until his heart left from under his chin and went back down into his chest where it belonged.
Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.
I can say that my narrative project is as difficult today as it was then.
Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glory bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.
And they might never forget.
I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too.
No, really. Just quiet. Nothing louder than waves lapping or ice melting in crystal glasses.
My puzzlement used to be ‘why is the Lone Ranger’ called ‘lone’ if he is always with Tonto. Now, I see that given the racial and metaphorical nature of the relationship, he is able to be understood as ‘alone’ precisely because of Tonto. Without him, he would be, I suppose, simply ‘Ranger’.
Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.
The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.
Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks.
You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you? I will never leave you again Don’t ever leave me again You will never leave me again You went in the water I drank your blood I brought your milk You forgot to smile I loved you You hurt me You came back to me You left me I waited for you.
Didn’t everything on God’s earth have or acquire defense? Speed, some poison in the leaf, the tongue, the tail? A mask, flight, numbers in the millions producing numbers in the millions. A thorn here, a spike there.
A blessing she was reckless enough to take for granted, lean on, as though Sweet Home was one... A bigger fool never lived.