One Crazy Summer Quotes

“We all have our la-la-la song. The thing we do when the world isn't singing a nice tune to us. We sing our own nice tune to drown out ugly.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“It was a strange, wonderful feeling. To discover eyes upon you when you expected no one to notice you at all.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“A name is important. It isn't something you drop in the litter basket or on the ground. Your name is now people know you. The very mention of your name makes a picture spring to mind, whether it's a picture of clashing fists or a mighty mountain that can't be knocked down. Your name is who you are and how you're known even when you do something great or something dumb.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“Saying "please" without saying it to someone you don't want to say "please" to in the first place tops the list of hard.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“If you knew what I knew, seen what I've seen, you wouldn't be so quick to pull the plow.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“Mommy gets up to give you a glass of water in the middle of the night. Mom invites your friends inside when it’s raining. Mama burns your ears with the hot comb to make your hair look pretty for class picture day. Ma is sore and worn out from wringing your wet clothes and hanging them to dry; Ma needs peace and quiet at the end of the day. We don’t have one of those. We have a statement of fact.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“We didn’t come for the revolution. We came for breakfast.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“Cecile made it sound like it was no big deal. "I've been fighting for freedom all my life." But she wasn't talking about protest signs, standing up to the Man, and knowing your rights. She was talking about her life. Just her. Not the people.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“I just took the box and nodded, because that's how you treat crazy people. You nod and count down twenty-seven days for crazy to come to an end.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“The last thing Pa and Big Ma wanted to hear was how we made a grand Negro spectacle of ourselves thirty thousand feet up in the air around all these white people.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“That was how I knew Sister Mukumbo was a real teacher, aside from her welcoming smile and her blackboard penmanship. She asked a teacher's type of question. The kind that says: Join in.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“The newspaper had said how the police ambushed the Black Panthers while they were in a car and how the Panthers fled inside a house for shelter. That there was a shoot-out. That the police fired at the Panthers and the Panthers fired at the police. That when Little Bobby came outside to surrender, and took off all his clothes except for his underwear to show he had no gun, they shot him anyway.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“Thank goodness you can’t see cherries in a chocolate bar. I’d have been a red-faced rose if not for my Hershey brown complexion”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“I didn’t want to say Big Ma was right. Cecile was no kind of mother. Cecile didn’t want us. Cecile was crazy. I didn’t have to.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“As we were walking out the door excited about our excursion, Cecile called out, “I’m not coming down to no police station if you’re out there stealing. Y’all have to spend the night in jail.” That was as good a “Be safe and have a good time” as we were going to get from Cecile. We took it and left.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“I’m used to doing what’s hard. Like three days’ worth of homework in one night to catch up from being out of school sick. Like forty-six push-ups in sixty seconds to win a bet with a boy. Like standing mean mouthed over Vonetta and Fern until they swallow a tablespoon each of hard pine cough syrup. But saying “please” without actually saying it to someone you don’t want to say “please” to in the first place tops the list of hard.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“Mother is a statement of fact. Cecile Johnson gave birth to us. We came out of Cecile Johnson. In the animal kingdom that makes her our mother. Every mammal on the planet has a mother, dead or alive. Ran off or stayed put. Cecile Johnson—mammal birth giver, alive, an abandoner—is our mother. A statement of fact.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“I wanted to write this story for those children who witnessed and were part of necessary change. Yes. There were children.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“I remember a time when smoke filled the house. Not coughing smoke but smoke from a woman’s smooth-voiced singing, with piano, bass, and drums. All together these sounds made smoke. Uncle Darnell would say, “You can’t remember that. You were two. Three, maybe.” But I do. I still see, hear, and feel bits and flashes. The sounds of musical smoke.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“I had a lot of those memories clicking before me like projector slides in the dark. Lots of pictures, smells and sounds flashing in and out.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“We're trying to break yokes. You're trying to make one for yourself.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“Imagine. To have your father sitting down eating dinner or shining his shoes while watching TV. To have your front door blown off its hinges and the police rush in. To see your father in handcuffs, led away.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“Hirohito tried to show no change in his face, but he was changing on the inside, where people change when they’re sad or angry.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“So, on the afternoon that Robert Frost’s horse had clip-clopped through the snow, I’d raised my hand and told the class my mother was a poet. “Now, now, Delphine,” Mrs. Peterson said, “nice girls don’t tell their classmates lies.” She’d kept me after school and told me she knew the truth about how my mother had left home and that wanting a mother was no excuse for dreaming one up. I couldn’t leave the classroom until I’d written “I will not tell lies in class” twenty-five times on the blackboard. And then I’d had to erase the board clean. Vonetta sulked something pitiful when Cecile told her to cut it out.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“A name is important. It isn’t something you drop in the litter basket or on the ground. Your name is how people know you. The very mention of your name makes a picture spring to mind, whether it’s a picture of clashing fists or a mighty mountain that can’t be knocked down. Your name is who you are and how you’re known even when you do something great or something dumb.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“dustpan that he emptied into a larger trash can. If I were him, picking up after people who carelessly dropped stuff on the ground, I’d be nothing but angry. They call it littering when you carelessly drop things. They call the careless folks who drop things by a cute name: litterbug. There’s nothing cute about dropping things carelessly. Dropping garbage and having puppies shouldn’t be called the same thing. “Litter.” I had a mind to write to Miss Webster about that. Puppies don’t deserve to be called a litter like they had been dropped carelessly like garbage. And people who litter shouldn’t be given a cute name for what they do. And at least the mother of a litter sticks around and nurses her pups no matter how sharp their teeth are. Merriam Webster was falling down on the job. How could she have gotten this wrong? Vonetta asked me again. Not because she was anxious to meet Cecile. Vonetta asked again so she could have her routine rehearsed in her head—her curtsy, smile, and greeting—leaving Fern and me to stand around like dumb dodos. She was practicing her role as the cute, bouncy pup in the litter and asked yet again, “Delphine, what do we call her?” A large white woman came and stood before us, clapping her hands like we were on display at the Bronx Zoo. “Oh, my. What adorable dolls you are. My, my.” She warbled like an opera singer. Her face was moon full and jelly soft, the cheeks and jaw framed by white whiskers. We said nothing. “And so well behaved.” Vonetta perked up to out-pretty and out-behave us. I did as Big Ma had told me in our many talks on how to act around white people. I said, “Thank you,” but I didn’t add the “ma’am,” for the whole “Thank you, ma’am.” I’d never heard anyone else say it in Brooklyn. Only in old movies on TV. And when we drove down to Alabama. People say “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am” in Alabama all the time. That old word was perfectly fine for Big Ma. It just wasn’t perfectly fine for me.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“Mama, or Ma.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“She refused to call Fern by her name, and that made Big Ma right about Cecile.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“Cecile”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“I slept lightly, expecting Fern to awaken during the night missing her truelove. Not that I wanted Fern to be heartbroken. I didn’t want her to love someone all her life and then not love or want them at all.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer