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Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires.
We didn’t initiate talk with grown-ups; we answered their questions.
They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict
the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. “Yes,” they had said. “You are right.”
But the unquarreled evening hung like the first note of a dirge in sullenly expectant air. An escapade of drunkenness, no matter how routine, had its own ceremonial close.
But her blackness is static and dread.
revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame.
My daddy’s face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche; his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale, cheerless yellow of winter sun;
They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds—cooled—and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.
“For babies.” Maureen raised two pencil-stroke eyebrows at the obviousness of the question. “Babies need blood when they are inside you, and if you are having a baby, then you don’t menstrate. But when you’re not having a baby, then you don’t have to save the blood, so it comes
The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.
Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave.
The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions.
between colored people and niggers. They were easily identifiable. Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud.
The cat shuddered and flicked his tail.
Even now spring for me is shot through with the remembered ache of switchings, and forsythia holds no cheer.
section never reached this part of town. This sky was always blue.
Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.
Her words were hotter and darker than the smoking berries, and we backed away in dread.
Then I feel like I’m laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colors, and I’m afraid I’ll come, and afraid I won’t. But I know I will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside. And it lasts and lasts and lasts.
God was a nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing white beard, and little blue eyes that looked sad when people died and mean when they were bad.
Far away somebody was playing a mouth organ; the music slithered over the cane fields and into the pine grove; it spiraled around the tree trunks and mixed itself with the pine scent, so Cholly couldn’t tell the difference between the sound and the odor that hung about the heads of the people.
and the delicate turn of their heads on those slim black necks had been like nothing other than a doe’s.
The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other.
And the difference was all the difference there was.
in flannel; eased their feet into felt. They were through with lust and lactation, beyond tears and terror.
And the lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes—a purée of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy.
whites didn’t care, unless they were looking for sport.
The insults were part of the nuisances of life, like lice.
if he was very still he would be all right. But then the trace of pain edged his eyes, and he had to use everything to send it away.
And then the tears rushed down his cheeks, to make a bouquet under his chin.
pieces of Cholly’s life could become coherent only in the head of a musician. Only those who talk their talk through the gold of curved metal, or in the touch of black-and-white rectangles and taut skins and strings echoing from wooden corridors, could give true form to his life.
father, there was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him.
that desire. But he did not dwell on it. He thought rather of whatever had happened to the curiosity he used to feel. Nothing, nothing, interested him now. Not himself, not other people. Only in drink was there some break, some floodlight, and when that closed, there was oblivion.
provided him with both comfort and courage, he believed that to name an evil was to neutralize if not annihilate
Celibacy was a haven, silence a shield.
The residue of the human spirit smeared on inanimate objects was all he could withstand of humanity.
He was what one might call a very clean old man.
herself in body, mind, and spirit from all that suggested Africa; to cultivate the habits, tastes, preferences that her absent father-in-law and foolish mother-in-law would have approved.
A hatred of, and fascination with, any hint of disorder or decay.
She had not lived by the sea all those years, listened to the wharfman’s songs all that time, to spend her life in the soundless cave of Elihue’s mind.
and wished he would hurry up and die. He regarded this wish for the dog’s death as humane, for he could not bear, he told himself, to see anything suffer.
The most exquisite-looking ladies sat on toilets, and the most dreadful-looking had pure and holy yearnings.
All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness.
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved.
Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.
