God Help the Child

You don't have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.

What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.

I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.

Correct what you can; learn from what you can’t.

When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.

They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow—some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite that story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin.

Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have?

You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent. Good luck and God help the child.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe.

I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

But stars can explode, disappear. Besides, what we see when we look at them may no longer be there. Some could have died thousands of years ago and we’re just now getting their light. Old information looking like news.

When I woke up I reminded myself that freedom is never free. You have to fight for it. Work for it and make sure you are able to handle it. Now

The sun and the moon shared the horizon in a distant friendship, each unfazed by the other.

Her color is a cross she will always carry.

At least she’s willing to figure it out, do something, risk something and take its measure. I risk nothing. I sit on a throne and identify signs of imperfection in others.

How can I take crime shows seriously where the female detectives track killers in Louboutin heels?

Things got better but I still had to be careful. Very careful in how I raised her. I had to be strict, very strict. Lula Ann needed to learn how to behave, how to keep her head down and not to make trouble. I don’t care how many times she changes her name. Her color is a cross she will always carry. But it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not. Bride I’m scared.

What kind of love is it that requires an angel and only an angel for its commitment?

my sex life became sort of like Diet Coke—deceptively sweet minus nutrition.

All he did from freshman year through sophomore was react -- sneer, laugh, dismiss, find fault, demean -- a young man's version of critical thinking.

He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have?

If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.

She didn’t say so, but it suddenly occurred to her that good sex was not knowledge. It was barely information.

Except for Adam I don’t know anything about love. Adam had no faults, was innocent, pure, easy to love. Had he lived, grown up to have flaws, human failings like deception, foolishness and ignorance, would he be so easy to adore or be even worthy of adoration? What kind of love is it that requires an angel and only an angel for its commitment?