277 Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

He knows something I don’t. Perhaps he’s looked into his own mirror and seen my father when I had only seen my father’s absence. Perhaps my father taught my brother what it meant to be a Black man in the South too well: unsteady work, one dead-end job after another, institutions that systematically undervalue him as worker, a citizen, a human being.

The memory is a living thing – it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives – the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead. –from One Writer’s Beginnings, by Eudora Welty.

We’re tired. We’re tired of having to figure out how to talk to our kids and teach them that America sees them as less, and that she just might kill them. This is the conversation we want to avoid. We’re tired of feeling futile in the face of this ever-present danger, this omnipotent history, predicated as this country is, founded as this country was, on our subjugation.

Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once a year or so, I see it in Pop, how he got leaner and leaner with age, the tendons in him standing out, harder and more rigid, every year. His Indian cheekbones severe. But since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that, too.

Ain’t no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that’s going to flush out the truth.

I didn’t understand time, either, when I was young. How could I know that after I died, Parchman would pull me from the sky? How could I imagine Parchman would pull me to it and refuse to let go? And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once?

It feels good to be mean, to speak past the baby I can’t hit and let that anger touch another. The one I’m never good enough for.

And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than to push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, “Why not?” It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.

The music, all violins and cellos, swells in the room, then recedes, like the water out in the Gulf before a big storm.