Their laughter would ring out abruptly, a sound Mother welcomed. Our slaves are happy, she would boast. It never occurred to her their gaiety wasn’t contentment, but survival.
The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.
The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it.
The road of 'God alone' struck me with unsettling fear. So I lingered in a kind of limbo. Unable to go back, unable to go on. Uncertain. Tentative. How strange that we tend to stand ankle-deep in the...
Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so...
Squeezing it in my palm, I prayed, Please, God, let this seed you planted in me bear fruit.
Sometimes I didn't even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I'd have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn't care.
She say Fon people keep a spirit tree and it always be a Baybob. Your granny-mauma wrapped the trunk with thread she begged and stole. She took me out there and say, 'We gon put our spirits in the tre...
She reminded me that the world was really one big bee yard, and the same rules worked fine in both places: Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear lon...
She had the look of someone who’d declared herself, and seeing it, my indignation collapsed and her mutinous bath turned into something else entirely. She’d immersed herself in forbidden privileges, y...
Sarah was up in her room with her heart broke so bad, Binah said you could hear it jangle when she walked.
Readiness for dying arrives by attending the smallest moment and finding the eternal inside of it.
My mother was a good Catholic -- she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary's in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.
I have one mind for the master to see. I have another mind for what I know is me.
How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.
Aunt-Sister said Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness.
Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition an...
A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.
We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.
Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?