Paradise

by Toni Morrison

learned there were some fifty black newspapers produced in the Southwest following Emancipation

She didn’t have on any lipstick but from one hundred and fifty feet, you could see her eyes.

He obviously had hope for a state that had once decided to build a whole new law school to accommodate one student—a Negro girl—and protect segregation at the same time. He clearly took seriously the possibility of change in a state that had also built an open closet right next to a classroom for another Negro student to sit in by himself.

In every Ruby household appliances pumped, hummed, sucked, purred, whispered and flowed. And there was time: fifteen minutes when no firewood needed tending in a kitchen stove; one whole hour when no sheets or overalls needed slapping or scrubbing on a washboard; ten minutes gained because no rug needed to be beaten, no curtains pinned on a stretcher; two hours because food lasted and therefore could be picked or purchased in greater quantity.

As though there was a new and more manly way to deal with whites. Not the Blackhorse or Morgan way, but some African-type thing full of new words, new color combinations and new haircuts. Suggesting that outsmarting whites was craven. That they had to be told, rejected, confronted. Because the old way was slow, limited to just a few, and weak. This last accusation swole Deek’s neck and, on a weekday, had him blowing out the brains of quail to keep his own from exploding.

People prosper here. Everybody.” “Everybody’s prospering on credit, Anna. That’s not the same thing.” “So?” “So what if the credit’s gone?” “It can’t be gone. We own the bank; the bank doesn’t own us.”

What could not be gainsaid, but would remain invisible in the newspapers and the books he bought for his students, were the ordinary folk. The janitor who turned off the switch so the police couldn’t see; the grandmother who kept all the babies so the mothers could march; the backwoods women with fresh towels in one hand and a shotgun in the other; the little children who carried batteries and food to secret meetings; the ministers who kept whole churchfuls of hunted protesters calm till help came; the old who gathered up the broken bodies of the young; the young who spread their arms wide to protect the old from batons they could not possibly survive; parents who wiped the spit and tears from their children’s faces and said, “Never mind, honey. Never you mind. You are not and never will be a nigger, a coon, a jig, a jungle bunny nor any other thing white folks teach their children to say. What you are is God’s.”

Finally, at seventy-nine, unlicensed but feisty, she was going to learn to drive and have her own car too. No more hitching up the wagon, no more brakes squealing in her yard at all hours, summoning her to emergencies that weren’t or to standbys that turned into crises.

who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them.