The Business of Lovers

by Eric Jerome Dickey

Do not be offended when someone does not live up to your needs or your expectations. It is part of living, part of life.”

Judge not in the moment, not while we are works in progress,

“My grandmother told me to marry a white man and improve the race. She is Portuguese, dark-skinned, and she believes in the philosophy behind the famous painting called The Redemption of Cain. You marry white, create a mulatto; they marry white, and now your family tree is officially white. That’s her brainwashing, a way of being accepted, safe in a hostile world. You marry white until all the lynching vanishes from your family tree.”

Women owned a level of closeness never shared by men.

“A brokenhearted man is a broken man, so he does things to make himself feel like a man worthy of being called a man again. Be careful what you do to make yourself feel like a man again.”