The world had ended, and I was the only person who knew it. People walked along e 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. The little pleasure I was able to take from the fact that if I could ...
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience certain 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. The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose.
Within weeks, I realized that my school mates and I were on paths moving diametrically away from each other. They were concerned and excited over the approaching football games, but I had in my immediate past raced a car down a dark and foreign Mexican moun tain. They concentrated great interest on who was worthy of being student body president, and when the metal bands would be removed from th...
My trips to the streetcar office were of the frequency of a person on salary. The struggle expanded. I was no longer in conflict only with the Market Street Railway but with the marble lobby of the building which housed its offices, and elevators and their operators. During this period of strain Mother and I began our first steps on the long path toward mutual adult admiration. She never asked ...
I leaned on the door jamb, lending him my physical presence but said no more. His room smelled of cooked grease, Lysol and age, but his face believed the freshness of his words, and I had no heart nor art to drag him back to the reeking reality of our life and times. I left his room because, and only because, we had said all we could say. The unsaid words pushed roughly against the thoughts tha...
It was me, Marguerite, against the elemental opposition. As I twisted the steering wheel and forced the accelerator to the floor I was controling Mexico, and might and aloneness and inexperienced youth and Bailey Johnson, Sr., and death and insecurity, and even gravity. When I saw he was fairly lucid I went to the car, calmly pushed the people away, and said from the haughty level of one who ha...
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education. I was prepared to accept Daddy Clidell as one more faceless name added to Mother’s roster of conquests. I had trained myself so successfully through the years to display interest, or at least attention, while my mind skipped free on other subjects th...
In the school itself I was disappointed to find that I was lot the most brilliant or even nearly the most brilliant student. The white kids had better vocabularies than I and what was more appalling, less fear in the classrooms. They never hesitated to hold up their hands in response to a teacher's question, even when they were wrong they were wrong aggressively, while I had to be certain about...
A person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese. Especially in view of the fact that they (the Blacks) had themselves undergone concentration-camp living for centuries in slavery's plantations and later in sharecroppers cabins. But the sensations of common relationship were missing. The ...
Mother’s beauty made her powerful and her power made her unflinchingly honest. She supported us efficiently with humor and imagination. Occasionally we were taken to Chinese restaurants or Italian pizza parlors. We were introduced to Hungarian goulash and Irish stew. Through food we learned that there were other people in the world.
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