What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? In our great-grandmothers’ day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.
El tiempo se mueve despacio, pero pasa deprisa.
June a good time to go off into the world.
We were not meant to suffer so much and learn nothing.
It seems wiser to do as hermit crabs do, find a shell and inhabit it.
The challenge for me is not to be a follower of Something but to embody it;.
Now I understand that all great teachers love us. This is essentially what makes them great. I also understand that it is this love that never dies, and that, having once experienced it, we have the confidence always exhibited by well-loved humans, to continue extending this same love.
She noticed that other girls were falling in love, getting married. It seemed to produce a state of euphoria in them. She became unsure that her own way of living was as pleasant as she thought it was. It seemed to have an aimlessness to it that did not lead anywhere. Day followed day, and the calm level of her pleasures as a single woman remained constant. Certainly she never reached euphoria. And she wanted euphoria to add to the other good feelings she had.
My heart hurt so much I can’t believe it. How can it keep beating, feeling like this? But I’m a woman. I love you, I say. Whatever happen, whatever you do, I love you.
Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love. And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.
No one escapes a time in life when the arrow of sorrow, of anger, of despair pierces the heart. For many of us, there is the inevitable need to circle the wound. It is often such a surprise to find it there, in us, when we had assumed arrows so painful only landed in the hearts of other people. Some of us spend decades screaming at the archer. Or at least for longer periods than are good for us. How to take the arrow out of the heart? How to learn to relieve our own pain? That is the question.
When Pa tell you to do something, you do it, he say. When he say not to, you don’t. You don’t do what he say, he beat you. Sometime beat me anyhow, I say, whether I do what he say or not. That’s right, say Harpo. But not Sofia. She do what she want, don’t pay me no mind at all. I try to beat her, she black my eyes. Oh, boo-hoo, he cry. Boo-hoo-hoo.
But I don’t want you to fight ’em until you gits completely fagged so that you turns into a black cracker yourself! For then they bondage over you in complete.
Several months ago, when Israel “annexed” the Golan Heights, a Jewish friend of mine visited that country. Upon his return he explained that Israel needed that land to protect itself from the possibility of enemy shells, apparently lobbed off its cliffs, into Israel. “But doesn’t that land belong to people?” I asked. “They’re not doing anything with it,” he replied. I thought: I have a backyard I’m not ‘doing anything with.’ Does that give you the right to take it?
Can you picture it at all, Celie? Because I felt like i was seeing black for the first time. And Celie, there is something magical about it. Because the black is so black the eye is simply dazzled, and there is the shining that seems to come, really from moonlight, it is so luminous, but their skin glows even in the sun.
Heaven. Now there’s a thought. Nothing has ever been able, ultimately, to convince me we live anywhere else. And that heaven, more a verb than a noun, more a condition than a place, is about leading with the heart in whatever broken or ragged state it’s in, stumbling forward in faith until, from time to time, we miraculously find our way.
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see; or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength – in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
He love looking at Shug. I love looking at Shug. But Shug don’t love looking at but one of us. Him. But that the way it spose to be. I know that. But if that so, why my heart hurt me so?
Our mothers taught us that in the old, old days, when they were their grandmothers and their grandmothers were old – for we are our grandmothers, you understand, only with lots of new and different things added.
The news always sound crazy. People fussing and fighting and pointing fingers at other people, and never even looking for no peace.