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(Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Gayle Jones, Lucille Clifton, Henry Dumas, Leon Forrest);
It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.
The five Sweet Home men looked at the new girl and decided to let her be. They were young and so sick with the absence of women they had taken to calves.
she who had to bring a fistful of salsify into Mrs. Garner’s kitchen every day just to be able to work in it, feel like some part of it was hers, because she wanted to love the work she did, to take the ugly out of it, and the only way she could feel at home on Sweet Home was if she picked some pretty growing thing and took it with her.
What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.
Then she went back in rice and I sucked from another woman whose job it was. So to answer you, no. I reckon not. She never fixed my hair nor nothing. She didn’t even sleep in the same cabin most nights I remember.
He saw a witless coloredwoman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies.
She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can’t hold another bite?
And as far as he is concerned, the world may as well know it. And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.
Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky;
Mr. Sawyer included midday dinner in the terms of the job—along with $3.40 a week—and
The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left.
A prettier thing God never made. White and purple with a tender tail and a hard head. Feels good when you hold it in your hand and smells like the creek when it floods, bitter but happy.
“Don’t box with me. There’s more of us they drowned than there is all of them ever lived from the start of time. Lay down your sword. This ain’t a battle; it’s a rout.”
Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.
