The Hand I Fan With Quotes

“The trick, Lena, baby, is to cherish yo' own little piece of earth, but not to get tied to it. 'Cause it ain't nothin' but a piece a' dust, like us, our bodies, that's gon' come and go.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Cause no matter how much you hurt, all they done is just be human. It's just people bein' human. You ain't in control, Lena. No matter how sweet ya want to do it. Doin' fo' people don't make 'em yo's. Everybody responsible fo' they own se'ves. Just like you.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“If you don't let yourself be crazy sometimes, baby...then you go mad.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Right is right, Lena. And right don't wrong nobody. When it happen the way it's s'posed to, eve'body come out on top, baby.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Every 'oman ain't got ta have a baby out a' her own body," Herman said causally, looking down at Lena's wiggling feet.

"How many babies have you had out a' your own body, Herman?" she asked tightly.

Lena felt like Sarah speaking to Abraham, sitting there with her old self talking to Herman with his near-140-year-old self about having babies.

"Well, baby, you ain't got to have a baby out yo' own body to know how it feel to have a baby, to be a mama or a papa.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Lena, baby, you don't look like no 'oman in her middle forties to me. Shoot, in my time, you'd be a grandmother many times over and ready fo' yo' grave. God, Lena, when my own mother was that age, she was a tired 'oman though she had enjoyed her life in the settlement. Life was just harder then, especially for womens. And look at you with yo' Victory Secrets underwear and yo' fast car and all yo' property. . ."

"Um, Herman, you almost sound like you resent I got the kind of life I got." Lena was a little hurt be the tone in Herman's voice and didn't try too hard to hide it.

"Oh no, baby, " Herman said seriously. "It's just so amazin' t' me that thangs could have changed so much in less than a hundred years."

Lena chuckled.

"I know you think that's a eternity -- a hundred years -- but it ain't hardly a tick on the clock or a cycle a' the moon.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“So ya'll gon' just go on and lose the blues music altogether," he came right out and said to her one night as they listened to a newly released CD of [Robert] Johnson.

"What you mean by that, Herman?"

"Well, if you don't 'ppreciate som'um, you lose it."

"And who are you talking about?"

"You know, Lena, black people in this country."

"Herman, you trying to say we don't care nothing about the blues?"

"I ain't tryin. I'm sayin' it. Ya'll gon lose it. Gon' look up, and it ain't gon be part a' us no mo'. It gon' be a part of somebody else, and we ain't gon' have nobody but ourse'fs to blame fo' it. Shoot, if it wa'n't fo' that trumpet-playin' boy from New Orleans, ya'll woulda lost Louis Armstrong. Lena, you gotta claim stuff to make it yo's. But we black folks gon' mess around and lose the blues. You watch.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Herman never said it in so many words, but Lena knew she was being drawn closer to the earth. And she knew that it was somehow Herman's doing. The further she pulled herself away from the things of the world -- her possessions, her businesses, her shoes, her dependents, her visits, even her gifts and acts of kindness -- the nearer she drew to the peaceful serene spirit of the world itself.

"You need to mo' like Mary and less like Martha," Herman would tell her gently when she still went off to take care of somebody. "Choose the better part, baby.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Taking the time to look, to smell, to recall, to touch, Lena began to see the earth in the way she had as a child. The way she had before everything around her seemed to turned sinister. She had eaten the earth around her house when she was three or four if her mother didn't prevent her. Now, with no one around to stop her, and with Herman thinking it was cute and natural, she ate a small amount of Middle Georgia clay and black-belt loam from the cupped palm of her hand whenever she felt like it.
Just the simple act of sitting on a wooden bench out by the barn and watching the wind gently disturb the fronds on the clumps of lemon grass all along the path down to the river became as moving, as prodigious, as phenomenal, as snatching up family land from the bank and getting it back in the hands of the original black owners.
Now, there was a symmetry to her life that she saw reflected in nature on her property, in the stories Herman told, in the crape myrtle leaves that he crushed in his hands and rubbed all over her exposed skin to keep biting bugs away.
She was even beginning to see some harmony in the death that always seemed to crop up all around her.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Ya gotta do the work you called to, Lena. But you ain't gotta be miserable. In fact, that's just what you ain't s'posed to be.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Well, if you don't 'ppreciate som'um, you lose it.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Here, Lena, tie this cotton kerchief 'round yo' mouth when we out walkin' in the woods...so yo' breath don't draw those 'squitas and bitin' flies.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“You can't put a thing in a clinched fist.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Funny thang 'bout freedom, baby. It seem to have a lot a' extra arms and limbs to grab hold a' thangs. It ain't always the thangs you want to grab holt of either.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“It's not the man in your life. It's the life in your man.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With

“Lena immediately thought of Sister Gemma in fourth grade who had instructed all the students at Blessed Martin de Porres Elementary to leave a little room on the edge of their seats for their guardian angels to sit.”
― Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With