3 Quotes by Zee Edgell

When the rains finally came that drought year, Beka's Dad tried to persuade Lilla to concentrate on bougainvillea, crotons, and hibiscus. Plants like these grew easily and luxuriantly in the yard, but Lilla kept those trimmed back, and continued to struggle year after year in her attempt to cultivate roses like those she saw in magazines which arrived in the colony three months late from England.

We can't sit down and keep rehashing what people did to us in the past, Ma, or use those injustices as any kind of complete excuse for our present situation. Every people have some kind of grievance. Fighting for our rights is a natural thing, but things don't often go according to rights, and rights have to be maintained one way or another. My main worry is, will we be able to hold onto our rights once we get them? Only the good-will of the world will help us do that in our present situation.

We creoles are so different, one from the other, that it's hard for us to mix properly amongst ourselves, let alone among Carib people who have a lot more things in common. Maybe its because Carib people remind us of what we lost trying to get up in the world. See, in the old days, according to Granny Straker, the more you left behind the old ways, the more acceptable you were to the powerful people in the government and the churches who had the power to change a black person's life.