More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
learned through a curriculum of intimidation and pain.
She took pleasure in categorizing her children by race. Mushy, Harvey, Sam, and Martha Jean were her white children. Tarabelle, Wallace, and Laura were Indians—Cherokee, no less. Edna and I were Negroes.
“One or the other, Lord,” I prayed aloud. “Help her or take her.”
In the absence of our mother, gluttony threatened to be our downfall.
mother’s ambivalent sobs as she wept for a child she truly loved—and hated.
was baffled by the ambiguities of my mother’s emotions and behavior. She denied and feared God in the same breath. She allowed our actions to shame her, and yet she was void of shame. I truly believed there was something unnatural about her—a madness that only her children could see. My yearning was not to understand it, but to escape it.
Anger is airborne. It can be inhaled, and once it enters a body it becomes a tenacious blob of blues and browns with tiny speckles of red. It settles heavy in the lungs, making breathing ever so difficult.
“It’s always been like this, Tangy.We’ve just been conditioned to accept it.
“I’m not afraid of her; I’m afraid of becoming her.That’s the shit scares the hell outta me.
