Silver Sparrow

Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.

People say, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you, doesn't kill you.

And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.

I knew by then that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her all my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there's no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate.

The key to life," he told me once, "is to avoid the highs and the lows. It's the peaks and valleys that mess you up.

PEOPLE SAY, THAT which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you. That’s all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that’s enough.

He's your father, but first he is a man. A man is just a man, and that's all we have to wok with.

I am neither religious nor superstitious, but there is something otherworldly about the space where two roads come together. The devil is said to set up shop there if you want to swap your soul for something more useful. If you believe that God can be bribed, it's also the hallowed ground to make sacrifices. In the literal sense, it's also a place to change direction, but once you've changed it, you're stuck until you come to another crossroads, and who knows how long that will be.

Silver” is what I called girls who were natural beauties but who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar. It wasn’t just how they looked, it was how they were. The name came from a song my mother sang sometimes when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special. She sang along with Aretha Franklin at the end: “Sail on, silver girl… Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way.

If there was ever a time to boil up some grits it is now.

What right did my father have to the details of my life? He squandered his chance to be the protective father. You can't come rushing to the rescue six months later. I wasn't a person to be saved only when it was a convenient time to swoop in.

The truth is a strange thing. Like pornography, you know it when you see it.

The bitter scratch of his unshaven good-night kiss will always, for me, be the sensation of grief.

It's funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury.

...she went about her business in a way that put me in mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have but you are not going to get any kind of spark.

My skin stayed the same while this difference snuck in through a pore and attached itself to whatever brittle part forms my center.

Some things were inevitable. You'd have to be a fool to think otherwise.

You can't tell your teacher that my name is James Witherspoon. Atlanta ain't nothing but a country town, and everyone knows everybody. Your other wife and your other girl is a secret?, I asked him. He put me down from his lap, so we could look each other in the face. No. You've got it the wrong way around. Dana you are the one that's a secret.

Everything was almost the same with her, but she went about her business in a way that put me in mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have, but you are not going to get any kind of spark.

...living here, you don't know anything about white people. Where I'm from, everything is mixed. In Atlanta, at least out here where we stay at, everything is so black that y'all don't know what it feels like to be black.

You only lie to people you love

Life is full of things you never figured on.

This, I now know, is how people go crazy and do things they regret. Look at the woman who almost killed Al Green.I am sure she cooked those grits, fully intending to eat them for breakfast. Then he did something that set her off. After that, she probably picked up the pot, just to scare him a little bit. Next thing she knew and the boiling grits were all over his face. There was a name for that kind of thing. "Crime of passion." It meant that it wasn't your fault.

But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open.

She and I have a connection. Today, the link is rusty, the current erratic, but there will always be something between us.

The next customer in line was a white woman who had purchased a set of baby’s pajamas for her pregnant sister. “Men,” the customer said. “Who can understand the way their minds work?” Mother knew what the lady was talking about, but she couldn’t laugh at a black man with her, even though she was only laughing at him for being a man.

It's funny how you think you can know a person

...and I wondered what it felt like to live inside such disloyal skin.