10 Quotes by Rita Williams-Garcia

It was a strange, wonderful feeling. To discover eyes upon you when you expected no one to notice you at all.

The last thing Pa and Big Ma wanted to hear was how we made a grand Negro spectacle of ourselves thirty thousand feet up in the air around all these white people.

I pressed and I prayed. It was only right that pressing went with prayer. That and being sorry. Every wrinkle was a patch of sorry to be smoothed and flattened.

We all have our la-la-la song. The thing we do when the world isn’t singing a nice tune to us. We sing our own nice tune to drown out ugly.

Saying “please” without saying it to someone you don’t want to say “please” to in the first place tops the list of hard.

A name is important. It isn’t something you drop in the litter basket or on the ground. Your name is now people know you. The very mention of your name makes a picture spring to mind, whether it’s a picture of clashing fists or a mighty mountain that can’t be knocked down. Your name is who you are and how you’re known even when you do something great or something dumb.

I had a lot of those memories clicking before me like projector slides in the dark. Lots of pictures, smells and sounds flashing in and out.

Mommy gets up to give you a glass of water in the middle of the night. Mom invites your friends inside when it’s raining. Mama burns your ears with the hot comb to make your hair look pretty for class picture day. Ma is sore and worn out from wringing your wet clothes and hanging them to dry; Ma needs peace and quiet at the end of the day. We don’t have one of those. We have a statement of fact.

We didn’t come for the revolution. We came for breakfast.