I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be.
But mostly I had books – so many books, and they were mine; I would not have to part with them. It had always been a dream of mine to just own a lot of books, to never part with a book once I had read it.
Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children.
I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are, why they invent a self that bears no resemblance to who they really are, why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.
She had shown me how to behave when applying for a job, how to show the proper amount of respect, submission, eagerness to please, even though in my heart I would not mean any of those things; she said that as soon as I had the job and was safely in it, I could let my real personality come out. I was not opposed to deception, but I woud have preferred not to start out that way.
How do you get to be a person who is made miserable because the weather changed its mind, because the weather doesn’t live up to your expectations? How do you get to be that way?
For some people, a fixed state of irritation is oxygen. I understand this all too well.
I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me – not even if I cried out.
I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was that they had known me from the moment I was born.
She smelled sometimes of lemons, sometimes of sage, sometimes of roses, sometimes of bay leaf. At times I would no longer hear what it was she was saying; I just liked to look at her mouth as it opened and closed over words, or as she laughed. How terrible it must be for all the people who had no one to love them so and no one whom they loved so, I thought.
I had never imagined my father dying. I had never inagined my parents dying. When I told Mariah this, she said that no one ever thinks their parents will die, ever, and I had to suppress the annoyance I felt at her for once again telling me about everybody when I told her something about myself.
I was numb, but it was from not knowing just what this new life would hold for me.
Isn’t that the last straw; for not only did we have to suffer the unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction to be had from “We made you bastards rich” is taken away, too.
No action in the present is an action planned with a view of its effect on the future. When the future, bearing its own events, arrives, its ancestry is then traced in a trancelike retrospect, at the end of which, their mouths and eyes wide with their astonishment, the people in a small place reveal themselves to be like children being shown the secrets of a magic trick.
I liked that sentence then and I like that sentence now but then I had no way of making any sense of it, I could only keep it in my mind’s eye, where it rested and grew in the embryo that would become my imagination.
You mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?
Something I had always known – the way I knew my skin was the color brown of a nut rubbed repeatedly with a soft cloth, or the way I knew my own name – something I took completely for granted, “the sun is shining, the air is warm,” was not so.
I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true. And so I made pleasant little noises that showed both modesty and appreciation, but inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem.
Mariah says, “I have Indian blood in me,” and underneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?
I shall never have the garden I have in my mind, but that for me is the joy of it; certain things can never be realized and so all the more reason to attempt them.