More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 28 - November 30, 2020
the soft-sloping hills that birth the sun, then swallow it in the evenings.
Love this
She was unable to place the unidentifiable loss of something that made all other losses bearable and all other invasions welcomed.
The women talk in hushed tones as though their voices were metal and Marva were glass.
Forlorn hibiscuses hang their heads, oblivious of the glittery sunshine that now peeks its head out—a golden apology for floods that destroyed some people’s homes in nearby Windfield and in the countryside. The yard turns a deep shade of green with all the weeds sprung, and running Marys wind themselves around tree trunks and fling themselves across flower beds. The mongrel dogs lick water from newly formed potholes in the street. And there, in the thick grass in the open lot by the fence, is the abandoned ball.
She’s grateful for the excuse of having to get Baby back home before his mother exits her study like Jesus resurrecting from the dead.
as if everyone in the building is the governor general.
The humour in this book has an authentic Caribbean flavour. It's very realistic.
pupils
Irises. ;-) editors, don't let down your writers.
She sees the cake her grandmother baked for her sitting on the dining table, hoisted on a plastic container turned upside down inside a bowl of water to prevent ants from crawling into it. It’s
Damn, that was our house, growing up.
WHEN TRU GETS HOME, SHE TAKES OFF THE DRESS, THROWS IT onto the floor, and makes yet another opening on the skin of her upper right thigh, breaking the surface with the razor she uses to carve a space for herself. A sanctuary. She watches the red bulb rise and rise like a lung inflated with a sudden intake of air.
Still, in the hard light of morning she searches for his face, his forgiving eyes, in crowds during her commute to work, struck by the commuters’ apathy as they shuffle like cattle. She scans the deep scowls on each of their faces for him. Sometimes she thinks she hears him say her name in the roar of a train engine, the way he laughed as if her name coated his tongue with sweetness.
Her heart punches her rib cage as if to punish her.
And just like that, Patsy let go. Her spirit gave way to the exhaustion she could no longer resist. It was better that way—better to exist numb, a mere husk that could float even on the most treacherous seas, than to feel pain.
She knows that the woman is not in Brooklyn, standing on Flatbush Avenue, but home. She went crazy in America, her mind halting in the loneliness, anxiety, and the soundlessness of things falling apart: a sweet surrender. What a relief it must be, Patsy thinks, to stare into the eyes of sorrow and break without the pretense of holding it together.
Her castaway innocence has long been drowned by the sea, and Patsy weeps for the girl who died with it.
and Patsy, as trusting as a child and as ardent as a woman, receives Claudette’s tongue like she did the wafer during her first Communion.
Sunday. In America there is no real day of rest. Worse, it’s Christmas Eve.
The memories come back in a scale of colors. Before they were merely just black-and-white. They now coalesce into a prism of clarity— a light that reflects the shadows that have always been there. Patsy always thought they were hers alone, but as she remembers the frail hope that died in her mother’s eyes and emptied all the rooms of her presence, Patsy realizes that the shadows were her mother’s too.
Be a good, obedient girl, an’ ah promise I’ll be back fah yuh. It was a lie.
Parallel to the Christian promise of Heaven
Each caress expressed to Tru that Marva was handling something of great value, something she regarded as her own.
This brought tears to my eyes.
