Status Updates From There There

“She doesn’t know why he should come, or why she calls out his name, waves him over.”

“The sound she makes is not a word. The sound she makes comes from below her feet, from the ground …”

Common thread of family/community - without thinking, each character’s (bill, Orvil, Opal, Jacquie) first impulse is to run toward the danger. Their first impulse is family.

“he feels God in the feeling of his face being slapped.”

“How could a hole make him feel more full?”

“you’re supposed to do the work of splitting the shells and reaping the seed benefit, and he’s just shoving handfuls in his mouth and chewing them up until he can swallow them shell and all.”

“There was only the open, living wound, and it itched somewhere on your body at all times.”

je suis un peu (beaucoup) bouleversée par ce que je lis

pg 129

not ready to finish this 😢

pg 98

the interlude… wow

reading this for school… no romance :(

pt 2

Ooh this one is heavy. Jacquie... I feel so many mixed emotions about her so far. Definitely just dropped a bomb

“We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into a braid--tied to the back of everything we'd been doing all along to get us here. We've been coming from miles. And we've been coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed.”

Not going to lie, not very into it.

p 45

we are getting there ladies and gents...

I’m really putting off my review for this 😂😂No one can make me review it.

“This was what it sounded like to make it through these hundreds of American years, to sing through them.”

“…knock at all the surfaces in your life like you were looking for a way in.”

“What they want is more and more, and when that isn’t enough, they want what can’t be gotten easily…”

“They take us, then leave us out here, leave us to dim to bone, then get all the way forgotten.”

“Names that are colors is what we have in common.”

“I watch my shadow grow long then flatten on the highway as a car flies by without slowing or seeming to notice me”

A shadow of what once was? A history that is unacknowledged?

“That’s how much those Oakland hills separate us from Oakland. Those hills bend time.”

“And we both said sorry back and forth until we started to cry and shake.”

“I only wish I had a white gun to give you then.”

“So we’re not just gonna go. We been here our whole lives. We don’t have anywhere to go.”