BarbaraNeely Quotes
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She wondered how soon after the first baby was born of the rape of a black woman by a white man did some slaver decide that light-skinned slaves were smarter and better by virtue of white blood? And how long after that had some black people decided to take advantage of that myth?
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Sometimes it’s hard being dark-skinned, just like it’s sometimes hard to be any shade of brown or yellow. But it’s not awful. We’re just as cute and wonderful as anyone else.
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Blanche stared at Emmeline’s door for a few moments, bristling with the desire to knock and trying to conquer her natural inclination to defy the voice of authority. It was one of the reasons she had not lasted in the waitressing, telephone sales, clerking, and typing jobs she’d tried over the years.
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Love and sex, honey. Either one can make you do the damndest things. The two combined will make you a sure ’nough fool.
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"Criminal justice" was a term she found more apt than it was meant to be.
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I wanted to pay homage to working women because they are the bridge that got us over.' My work is about the people who are assumed not to have a worldview.
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Anytime you get this many light-skinned black people together at least half of them are going to be folks who act light-skinned.
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She’d once asked a black psychologist whose house she’d cleaned on Long Island about black people’s attachment to clothes. She’d told Blanche it probably was partly due to African peoples’ belief in body adornment in a spiritual way, and partly because, consciously or unconsciously, black people in America hoped clothes would make them acceptable to people who hated them no matter what they wore.
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Maybe his stuff was so good it made her think she could fly!
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On speaking of family secrets. I don't know how you heal a wound and not let it get some air.
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He gave Blanche the cheeky “Hey, girl” greeting that teenage white boys working up to being full-fledged rednecks give grown black women in the South. Blanche hissed some broken Swahili and Yoruba phrases she'd picked up at the Freedom Library in Harlem and told the boy it was a curse that would render his penis as slim and sticky as a lizard's tongue. The look on his face and the way he clutched his crotch lifted her spirits considerably.
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She was a thin, sharp-boned woman who reminded Blanche of ribbon candy—all curves and gloss.
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Today’s national movements, women’s and blacks’, seem more interested in being players in the white male club than challenging the white male patriarchy.
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Southern law enforcement people were even worse: the descendants of the paddyrollers and overseers who’d made their living grinding her kind into fertilizer in the cotton fields of slavery.
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Her questions about whether Palmer would have raped her if she hadn’t been taking a forbidden bath on the job, if she’d remembered to lock the bathroom door, if she had tried to fight despite his knife—all her secret worry that it was these mistakes, her mistakes, that had caused her rape—were revealed to her as utter and total bullshit. If she’d been strutting down the street buck-naked, he didn’t have a right to touch her. No. If that woman across the street told her husband he was the worst fuck in history and gave him dog food for dinner, he didn’t have a right to hit her. No. Just because women were blamed for everything but good luck didn’t give nobody a right to do them wrong. And it didn’t mean they were supposed to take it when they were done wrong. All this woman-hurting shit had to stop. “Stop!”
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How could he ever be her friend and not understand this very basic part of who she was? Would he have a friend who chose to marry someone who hated people with Down’s syndrome? But, of course, white folks in this country are trained to believe they can have it both ways, like stealing the Indian’s land while claiming to admire the Noble Savage.
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She was suspicious of anyone who was pushing not one, not two, but three male-led religions rolled into one.
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But given the many shapes and forms the back door could take, she was pretty sure he’d already been through a couple of them, whether he knew it or not. Was it even possible to grow up a poor black man in America and avoid the back door?
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The longer I live, the more boring youth becomes. So redundant. Each generation rediscovers the wheel of rebellion, the wheel of love, and so forth and so on. We hardly know which end is up until we’re in our thirties.
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Nowadays, people wanted to tell you class didn't exist and color didn't matter anymore. Look at Miss America and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Miss America and the chairman were no more black people than Mother Teresa was white people. Men like Nate and women like her were the people, the folks, the mud from which the rest were made. It was their hands and blood and sweat that had built everything, from the North Carolina governor's mansion to the first stoplight.
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They jealous ’cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in ’em, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, got dusk. But it’s only them that’s got night can become invisible. People what got night in ’em can step into the dark and poof—disappear! Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not.
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In Blanche’s experience, the more a person believed love was a part of what they got from their employer, the more likely it was that the person was being asked to do things that only love could justify.
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If a way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, surely the way to a mother’s heart was through her children.
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No matter how old we get, life's always got a lesson for you. Most likely one you've learned ten times before.