I’ve never thought of leaving the South, never.
Through my tears I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely.
I’m a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people’s lives.
I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.
Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.
And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.
I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.
When I die, I will no be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.
Where there is a woman there is magic.
Creation is everything you do. Make something.
Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet.
Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings, and yet be very respectable.
I hit my head against the wall because I don’t want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don’t want to feel all these wretched things, but they’re in me already. If I don’t get rid of them, I’m not ever going to feel anything else.
Novels allow me to create a whole world.
What I want and I wanted to be unforgettable.
The poems introduce the girls to other kinds of people of color, other worlds. To adventure, and kindness, and cruelty. Cruelty that we usually think we face alone, but we don’t. We discover that by sharing with each other we find strength to go on. The poems are the play’s first hint of the global misogyny that we women face.
Sassafras had never wanted to weave, she just couldn’t help it. There was something about the feel of raw fleece and finished threads and dainty patterned pieces that was as essential to her as dancing to Carmen De Lavallade, or singing to Aretha Franklin. Her mama had done it, and her mama before that; and making cloth was the only tradition Sassafras inherited that gave her a sense of womanhood that was rich and sensuous, not tired and stingy.