Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?
In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.
As I think about anyone or anything – whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film – as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?
When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives.
And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.
Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few.
We must make language accountable to the truths of our experience.
Buddy and Angela keep track of daytime just by figuring out the last and next time they will come together and how long alone. They become the heated habit of each other.
We had to break those laws or agree to the slaveholder’s image of us: three fifths of a human being.
Something has to be done about the way in which this world is set up.
This is the meaning of poverty: when you have nothing better to do than to hate somebody who, just exactly like yourself, has nothing better to do than to pick on you instead of trying to figure out how come there’s nothing better to do.
Who the hell set things up like this?
A man is not a tree’... If we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.
This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.
I try to use words, whether in prose or poetry, that people can understand, that make them feel in an intense way. I’m a writer, that’s what I do.
The whole world will become a home to all of us, or none of us can hope to live on it, peacefully. But much of the American dream mistakenly supposes that, like a tree, we will grow and flourish, standing in one place where we murmur doomed declarations about our roots, about finding our roots, or putting down roots. In fact, of course, if we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.
The expression of hatred for your enemies is sometimes the only way to end self-hatred.
I could no longer participate in an exchange requiring acrobatics of self-denial.
In the context of tragedy, all polite behavior is self-denial.
Our runaways may well be the backbone courageous among our kids: the ones who will risk hunger and forced prostitution and jail and death, in order to say NO to this overwhelming suffocation and victimizing, adult defeat into which they have been trapped, by dint of being born.