Important Quotations Explained
1. If
growing up is painful for the Southern Black
girl,
being aware of her displacement is the rust on
the
razor that threatens the throat. It is an
unnecessary
insult.
2. A
light shade had been pulled down between the Black community and
all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop
a fear-admiration-contempt for the white “things”—white folks' cars
and white glistening houses and their children and their women.
But above all, their wealth that allowed them to waste was the most enviable.
3. My
race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching,
yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed
and raped. . . . This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost
we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the
accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little
higher than the apes.
4. Bailey
was talking so fast he forgot to stutter, he forgot to scratch his
head and clean his fingernails with his teeth. He was away in a
mystery, locked in the enigma that young Southern Black boys start
to unravel, start to try to unravel, from seven years old to death.
The humorless puzzle of inequality and hate.
5. The
Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common
forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite
crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black
lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges
a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and
even belligerence.
