To read or not to read...an internationally celebrated female author
To read or not to read, that is the question! Read the opening paragraphs of this book, and you decide!
There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She sais, "Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind."
My mauma was shrewd. She didn't get any reading or writing like me. Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy. She looked at my face, how it flowed with sorrow and doubt, and she said, "You don't believe me? Where do you think these shoulder blades of yours came from, girl?
Those skinny bones stuck out from my back like nubs. She patted them and said, "This all what left of your wings. They nothing but these flat bones now, but one day you gon get 'em back."
I was shrewd like mauma. even at ten I knew this story about people flying was pure malarkey. We weren't some special people who lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren't going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly alright, but here wasn't any magic in it.
The day life turned into nothing this world could fix, I was in the work yard boiling slave bedding, stoking the fire under the wash pot, my eyes burning from specks of lye soap catching on the wind. The morning was a clod one- the sun looked like a little white button stitched tight to the sky. For summers we wore homespun cotton dresses over our drawers, but the Charleston winter showed up like some lazy girl in November or January, we got into our sacks-these thickset coats made of heavy yarns. Just like an old sack with sleeves. Mine was a cast-off and trailed to my ankles. I couldn't say how many unwashed bodies had worn it before me, but hey had all kindly left their scents on it.
To keep reading this book, request it from the Library.
To keep reading this book, request it from the Library.
