1. (p6)
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. (P26)
They opened the knuckle of the hams with their deadly-looking knives, took out a certain round harmless bone (‘ it could make the meat go bad ‘) and rubbed salt, coarse brown salt that looked like fine gravel, into the flesh, and the blood popped to the surface.
3. (P27)
We were explorers walking without weapons into man-eating animals’ territory.
4. (P27)
In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than that they were different, to be dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the worked for and the ragged against the well dressed.
5. (P39)
When I was a child I spake as a child, O thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
6. (P45)
Turning off or turning out people was my highly developed art.
7. (P47)
Naked I came into the world, and naked I shall go out.
8. (P48)
Later he explained that when a person is beating you, you should scream as loud as possible; maybe the whipper will become embarrassed or else some sympathetic soul might come to your rescue.
9. (P53)
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’ - whitefolks’ cars and white glistening houses and their children and their women.
10. (P56)
I could cry anytime I wanted by picturing my mother ( I didn’t quite know what she looked like ) lying in her coffin. Her hair, which was black, was spread out on a tiny little white pillow and her body was covered with a sheet. The face was brown, like a big O, and since I couldn’t fill in the features I printed MOTHER across the O, and tears would fall down my cheeks like warm milk.
11. (P62)
In later years I asked serif she loved means she brushed me of with: “God is love. Just worry about whether you’re being a good girl, then He will love you.”
12. (P72）
A natural comedian, he never waited for the laugh that he knew must follow his droll statements.
13. (P74)
I could never put my finger on her realness. She was so pretty and so quick that even when she had just awakened, her eyes full of sleep and hair tousled, I thought she looked just like the Virgin Mary.
14. (P74)
The weight of appreciation and the threat, which was never spoken, of a return to Momma were burdens that clogged my childish wits into impassivity.
15. (P78）
We fattened the pigs all year long for slaughter on the first good frost, and even as I suffered for the cute little wiggly things, I knew how much I was going to enjoy the fresh sausage and hog’s head cheese they could give me only with their deaths.
16. (P93)
Just by breath, carrying my words out, might poison people and they’d curl up and die like ‘ the black fat slugs ’ that only pretended.
17. (P94)
In the first weeks my family accepted my behavior as a post-rape, post-hospital affliction.
….
When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called impudent and my muteness sullenness.
18. (P101)
For nearly a year, I sopped around the house, the Store, the school and the church, like an old biscuit, dirty and inedible.
19. (P122)
I thought of myself as hanging in the Store, a mote imprisoned on a shaft of sunlight. Pushed and pulled by the slightest shift of air, but never falling free into the tempting darkness.
20. (P131)
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 descend the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.
21. (P165)
The wind blew over the roof and ruffled the shingles. It whistled sharp under the closed door. The chimney made fearful sounds of protest as it was invaded by the urgent gusts.
22. (P167)
If his look had contained contempt or patronage, or any of the vulgar emotions revealed by adults in confrontation with children, I would have easily gone back to my book, but his eyes gave off a watery noting - a nothingness which was completely unbearable.
23. (P180)
The change in the room was remarkable. Shadows which had lengthened and darkened over the bed in the corner had disappeared or revealed themselves as dark images of familiar chairs and such. The light which dashed on the ceiling steadied, and imitated rabbits rather than lions, and donkeys instead of ghouls.
24. (P185）
Youth and social approval allied themselves with me and we trammeled memories of slights and insults. The wind of our swift passage remodeled my features. Lost tears were pounded to mud and then to dust. Years or withdrawal were brushed aside and left behind, as hanging ropes of parasitic moss.
25. (P194)
We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous.
26. (P197) 标注来源歌词：Lift Every Voice and Sing - J. ROSAMOND JOHNSON
‘We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.’
27. (P264)
(The dread of futility has been my lifelong plague.) Excitement, apprehension, release and anger had drained me of mobility. I waited for fate, the string puller, to dictate my movements.
28. (P274)
Although I had no regrets, I told myself sadly that growing up was not the painless process one would have thought it to be.
29. (P277)
It was a little like Switzerland in World War 2. Shells were bursting all around me, souls were tortured and I was powerless in the confines of imposed neutrality - hopes were dying.
30. (P278)
When rain comes finally, washing away a low sky of muddy ocher, we who could not control the phenomenon are pressed into relief. The near-occult feeling: The fact of being witness to the end of the world gives way to tangible things. Even if the succeeding sensations are not common, they are at least not mysterious.
31. (P282)
I left his room because, and only because, we had said all we could say. The unsaid words pushed roughly against the thoughts that we had no craft to verbalize, and crowed the room to uneasiness.
32. (P284)
Life was cheap and death entirely free.
33. (P284)
From disappointment, I gradually ascended the emotional ladder to haughty indignation, and finally to that state of stubbornness where the mind is locked like the jaws of an enraged bulldog.
34. (P291)
To be left alone on the tightrope pf youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.
35. (P304)
People walked along the streets as if the pavements hadn’t all crumbled beneath their feet. They pretended to breathe in and out while all the time I knew the air had been sucked away in a monstrous inhalation from God Himself. I alone was suffocating in the nightmare.
Comments