To the very end, Mommy is a flying compilation of competing interests and conflicts, a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman’s physical problem.
Deacon Cuffy Lambkins of Five Ends Baptist Church became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.
Son, you looks like a character witness for a nightmare. You ugly enough to have your face capped.” “We can’t all be pretty,” he grumbled. “Well, you ain’t no gemstone, son. You got a face for swim trunk ads.” “I’m seventy-one, Sister Paul. I’m a spring chicken compared to you. I don’t see no mens doing backflips at the door over you. At least I ain’t got enough wrinkles in my face to hold ten days of rain.
Friendship was trouble in business.
My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing one another. It was our way of dealing with realities over which we had no control.
He ain’t dead. They say just his ear’s shot off.” “That don’t sound like me. It ain’t smart to shoot a man’s ear off. A man ain’t got but two.
As he sat before the elderly Irishman in his boxcar, the moment of realization suddenly tumbled into Elefante’s consciousness with startling efficiency, landing on his insides with a heaviness that felt like a blacksmith’s hammer falling on an anvil.
And no resident in their right mind would go over their heads to the mighty Housing Authority honchos in Manhattan, who did not like their afternoon naps disturbed with minor complaints about ants, toilets, murders, child molestation, rape, heatless apartments, and lead paint that shrunk children’s brains to the size of a full-grown pea in one of their Brooklyn locations, unless they wanted a new home sleeping on a bench at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
For God’s people – all of ’em.
My brothers and sisters were my best friends, but when it came to food, they were my enemies.
But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas, something that said, “Guess what, you so-and-so, I am God’s child. And I. Am. Still. Here.
But pretending to know everything and acting like you’re better than you know you are puts a terrible strain on a body. It makes you a stumbling stone to your own justice.
Light is only possible through dialogue between cultures, not through rejection of one or the other.
Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul. Big.
The bands were horrible outfits that sounded like owls hooting. Moshe watched in puzzlement as these Americans danced with clumsy satisfaction at the moans and groans of these boneless, noise-producing junk mongers, their boring humpty-dumpty sounds landing on the dance floor with all the power of empty peanut shells tossed in the air.
Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.
In four months, he had become a living embodiment of l’chaim, a toast to life. A.
Whenever they feel like working, they sit and wait till the feeling passes.
So many of God’s dangers, he thought, are not the gifts they appear to be.
It sat proudly atop the hill behind wrought-iron gates, with smooth lawns, tennis courts, and shiny classroom buildings, a monstrous bastion of arrogant elegance, glowing like a phoenix above the ramshackle neighborhood of Chicken Hill.