I went into this book knowing that there was childhood rape. This is a hard story of a difficult childhood, but it is a true story and the awful events are portrayed matter-of-factly and not dramatized or made sensational in their re-telling.
"Whatever was given by Black people to other Blacks was most probably needed as desperately by the donor as by the receiver. A fact which made the giving or receiving a rich exchange."
"I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed."
"The real festivities would begin after the fight. Then eve the old Christian ladies who taught their children and tried themselves to practice turning the other cheek would buy soft drinks, and if the Brown Bomber's victory was a particularly bloody one they would order peanut patties and Baby Ruths also."
"The intensity with which young people live demands that the "lank out" as often as possible. I didn't actually thing about facing Mother until the last day of our journey. I was "going to California." To oranges and sunshine and movie stars and earthquakes and (finally I realized) to Mother."
"Especially in view of the fact that they (the Blacks) had themselves undergone concentration-camnp living for centuries in slavery's plantations and later in sharecroppers' cabins."
"The special person that I was, the intelligent mind that God and I had created together..."
"The house was smudged with unspoken thoughts and it was necessary to go to my room to breathe."
(Spoiler alert:) "Not a bit of it. Within weeks, I realized that my schoolmates and I were on paths moving diametrically away from each other. They were concerned and excited over the approaching football games, but I had in my immediate past raced a car down a dark and foreign Mexican mountain. They concentrated great interest on who was worthy of being student body president, and when the metal bands would be removed from their teeth, while I remembered sleeping for a month in a wrecked automobile and conducting a streetcar in the uneven hours of the morning... Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of. I knew I knew very little, but I was certain that the things I had yet to learn wouldn't be taught to me at George Washington High School."
""Mother, I've got to talk to you . . ." It was going to kill me to have to ask her, for in the asking wouldn't it be possible that the suspicion would fall on my own normality? I knew her well enough to know that if I committed almost any crime and told her the truth about it she not only wouldn't disown me but would give me her protection."
"I had to give a small laugh too, although I wasn't tickled at all. But it's mean to watch someone enjoy something and not show your understanding of their enjoyment."
(Spoiler alert:) "In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric. He must believe that for his ends to be served all things and people can justifiably be shifted about, or that he is the center not only of his own world but of the worlds which other inhabit. I had neither element in my personality, so I hefted the burden of pregnancy at sixteen onto my own shoulders where it belonged. Admittedly, I staggered under the weight."
I suppose the story of anyone's childhood is all about their relationship (or lack of relationship) with their caregivers. It is fitting that this chapter of her life ends with Maya becoming a caregiver for someone else. That's not always where a childhood ends; it's not where my childhood ended. But it is a poetic ending.
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