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Kindle Notes & Highlights
There’s nothing I can do, there’s nothing any of us can do now, except wait for what’s coming.
I was Mother’s dress size when I was eleven.
A Tareyton ad comes on, the one where the girl smoking the cigarette has a black eye—Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!
There is a skirmish in Vietnam. The reporter seems to thinks it’ll be solved without much fuss.
Despite what he thinks he “knows” about me, I can’t help but appreciate that someone out there cares enough to stand up for me.
No easter-egg suits here. Flowers! Big bright stripes! And hemlines that showed several inches of thigh. It was electric and gorgeous and dizzying. This Emilio Pucci character must stick his finger in a socket every morning.
have my hair lightened and trimmed and ironed straight.
the radio playing a band called the Rolling Stones
his grandmother’s ring is sitting on Mother’s velvet sofa like some ridiculous metaphor.
“I’m not making trouble, Stuart. The trouble is already here.”
I wait on white ladies who walk right out the bedroom wearing nothing but they personality,
like it’s too hot to even tell me what to do.
The sprinkler be blooming up into the treetops, making them rainbows.
makes me wonder if things done changed just a little. It is 1964 after all. Downtown, they letting Negroes set at the Woolworth counter.
I’ve had a secret joy and a secret dread both rattling inside a me that make waxing floors go even slower and washing underwear a uphill race.
I wish Minny was wishing for change in the direction a kindness,
Point is, we got to watch what get up in these kids’ heads.
What I know is, I got it started
My cup is spilling over. Those is new words to me.
This lady looks like one a them hippies I seen on Miss Leefolt’s tee-vee. She got on a short white dress and sandals. Her hair’s long without no spray on it. The weight of it’s worked out the curl and frizz.
“Miss Skeeter say the peace dove be the sign for better times to come. Say folks is wearing em on they clothes out in California.”
since the freedom rides started and them civil rights workers disappeared in that station wagon
Just two months ago the white library started letting colored people in.
“Why I got to do dinner? It’s Sugar’s turn!” “Cause Sugar at Miss Celia’s and you want a live to see third grade.”
He is the fastest talking Southern man I ever heard.
he do a piece on the new Interstate 55 they gone build, going through Jackson all the way to New Orleans.
chatting bout some book called Little Big Man.
Doctor Strong and Miss Julia will just have to turn the world without me today.
“You punch the button and the channel change and you don’t even have to get up from your chair.”
“I reckon people gone be flying to the moon pretty soon,”
She probably shaking her head in bed last night, reading bout this awful woman who don’t know how to love her own child.
“The fool’s stuck in the hair dryer hood again. I told her not to put her head in there when she got them big rollers in.”
would just be another jail key on that witch’s belt.
The green-vined wallpaper is snaking up the walls.
It was a scream, like material ripping into two shredded pieces.
What if I never leave? What if I’m stuck. Here. Forever?
“The doctors want me to go up to Memphis for…shock treatment…”
Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us.
Sometimes, changing diapers can be like opening treasure.
Tell her it’s about my sick sister.” And Lord, don’t You go getting me for that lie. Last thing I need is a sister getting sick.
“You can’t move. You got to be brave. And no violets.” Then she stick her tongue out at him and start pinging him with baby doll shoes and Li’l Man look at her like Why am I putting up with this nonsense?
Our book is setting in five thousand houses, on they bookshelves, next to they night tables, behind they toilets?
How can anybody sleep with all them bees?
feel myself falling down that black hole we dug for ourselves.
the kitchen is a nice cool square.
shake her finger at us, warning us against it, as if a bunch of rich white kids might fall to the evils of cotton-picking, like cigarettes or hard liquor.
You felt loved when you tasted Demetrie’s caramel cake.
quietly educating him on the where-from-abouts of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Oprah Winfrey, Jim Henson, Faith Hill, James Earl Jones, and Craig Claiborne, the food editor and critic for The New York Times. I informed him that Mississippi hosted the first lung transplant and the first heart transplant and that the basis of the United States legal system was developed at the University of Mississippi.
I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person.
