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Some longed for the world before, settling into movie theaters to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Titanic, sharing in the awe of misshapen memories.
Strangely, Charlie liked the fear. So often having to overcome that prick of terror, he’d learned to find nobility in enduring it. A sense of self, even.
“We have to strip out what existed before.
Better to understand why you do it, not just how.”
And if Vivian was honest with herself, by then those things didn’t matter to her either. She was tired. All that fighting and too little change. Too many hopes dashed. Too many funerals.
How could she possibly keep her daughter safe from all that being black in this country weaponized against her? Protect her life, of course, but proportionally protect her mind and heart? Did any place exist where the path to her daughter finding herself wasn’t obstructed? Was there ever any room in this country for little black girls to fully self-actualize?
what is a truth when fact is no longer accepted as true?
“As long as you have something worth learning, you teach. That’s the way of the world now.”
His recollection of childhood was blushed red with love, but understood that red as more a terror in focus.
that’s our struggle: identity. Who we are, and when we can finally be anything we want to be.”
don’t want my child to carry what I carry, to feel what I feel. I want Zu to be free. And the only way to be free is to set them free. ‘Go on,’ I say. ‘Go on and be,’ and I make the space for them to be. That means moving my own shit—baggage, fears, worries—out of their way. Our children won’t be like us, they will be better. So we can’t put our insecurities on them. Space and time. For you and for them.”
Clotilda
did you know that Haiti’s slave revolution is the only one that has ever won back its freedom? They beat the French back so many times and so badly those Frenchmen ended up just selling Louisiana to America along with all the gateways to the west. All so the French didn’t have to go back and fight that little island again. Without Haiti, America wouldn’t be America, y’know, Manifest Destiny and all that. Haiti changed the trajectory of the world.”
But we came to learn paradise is the mind. What you believe about yourself. What you know about yourself. We have a lot of work to do, and we know it will never be perfect. But better is a direction. As long as we progress, together, we will be all right. Mobile is movement. We are all movement.”
