We cry ’cause we slave. In night time we cry, we say we born and raised to be free people and now we slave. We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis. It strange to us. Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say. Some makee de fun at us.
Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate.
Packed tight like a case of celery, only much darker than that. They were all against her, she could see. So many were there against her that a light slap from each one of them would have beat her to death. She felt them pelting her with dirty thoughts.
Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing,” she was told over and again.
A man is up against a hard game when he must die to beat it.
So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.
She went on in her overalls. She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.
The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.
Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.
She knew because she looked.
Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?
Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made.
Pheoby’s hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story.
Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in de world.
The present was too urgent to let the past intrude.
Naw, Ah ain’t no young gal no mo’ but den Ah ain’t no old woman neither. Ah reckon Ah looks mah age too. But Ah’m uh woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat’s uh whole lot more’n you kin say. You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but ’tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice. Humph! Talkin’ ’bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life.
Six eyes were questioning God.
Sorrow dogged by sorrow is in mah heart.
Hurrying, dragging, falling, crying, calling out names hopefully and hopelessly.
Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me.