God Help the Child

by Toni Morrison

Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not

Memory is the worst thing about healing.

Hitting the floor, she always says, requires a choice—lie there or bounce.

Correct what you can; learn from what you can’t.

If they had bashed in the door they would have seen a woman finally broken down after fifteen years of staying strong. For the first time after all those years, I cried. Cried and cried and cried until I fell asleep. When I woke up I reminded myself that freedom is never free. You have to fight for it. Work for it and make sure you are able to handle it.

the gift that neither of us planned: the release of tears unshed for fifteen years. No more bottling up. No more filth. Now I am clean and able.

THE SUN AND the moon shared the horizon in a distant friendship, each unfazed by the other.

What did she know anyway about good for its own sake, or love without things?

Booker was the one person she was able to confront—which was the same as confronting herself, standing up for herself. Wasn’t she worth something? Anything?

hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead.

Sober as priests, creative as devils, they invented sex. So they believed.

“Scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it.”

Thank you. You showed me rage and frailty and hostile recklessness and worry worry worry dappled with such uncompromising shards of light and love it seemed a kindness in order to be able to leave you and not fold into a grief so deep it would break not the heart but the mind that knows the oboe’s shriek and the way it tears into rags of silence to expose your beauty too dazzling to contain and which turns its melody into the grace of livable space.

You should take heartbreak of whatever kind seriously with the courage to let it blaze and burn like the pulsing star it is unable or unwilling to be soothed into pathetic self-blame because its explosive brilliance rings justifiably loud like the din of a tympani.

Don’t know why There’s no sun up in the sky … Can’t go on. Everything I had is gone, Stormy weather …

“You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.”

“It was perfect for a while, the two of us.” “What caused the split?” “Lies. Silence. Just not saying what was true or why.”

“You need a noble reason to fail, don’t you? Or some really deep reason to feel superior.”

Booker and Queen stared at each other for a long time until she stood up and, not taking the trouble to hide her disappointment, said, “Fool,” and left him slouched in his chair.

Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow—some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite that story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin. What waste. She knew from personal experience how hard loving was, how selfish and how easily sundered. Withholding sex or relying on it, ignoring children or devouring them, rerouting true feelings or locking them out. Youth being the excuse for that fortune-cookie love—until it wasn’t, until it became pure adult stupidity.

It took some time to figure out the motives for faking love—hers and theirs. Survival, she supposed, literal and emotional.

“You still believe heartbreak should burn like a star?” “I do. But stars can explode, disappear. Besides, what we see when we look at them may no longer be there. Some could have died thousands of years ago and we’re just now getting their light. Old information looking like news. Speaking of information,

How long had childhood trauma hurtled him away from the rip and wave of life? His eyes burned but were incapable of weeping.

Then he offered her the hand she had craved all her life, the hand that did not need a lie to deserve it, the hand of trust and caring for—a combination that some call natural love.

If I sound irritable, ungrateful, part of it is because underneath is regret. All the little things I didn’t do or did wrong.

You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent.