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It would have been near impossible to maintain formality under a small town's invasions of privacy.
worse. You smart. I swear to God, I rather you have a good mind than a cute behind.”
Excitement is a drug, and people whose lives are filled with violence are always wondering where the next “fix” is coming from.
I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
The white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren't even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Louises.
The ugliness they left was palpable. An uninvited guest who wouldn't leave.
Mother's beauty made her powerful and her power made her unflinchingly honest.
achievements. The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.
“That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, ‘Can't do is like Don't Care.’ Neither of them have a home.”
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
