The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Maybe we have only a finite amount of love to give. We're born with our portion, and if we love and are not loved enough in return, it's depleted.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

...Hattie wanted to give her babies names that weren't already chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and of hope, reaching-forward names, not looking-back ones.

I probably always will be. But I’ve been mad all my life, and I finally figured out that I couldn’t keep carrying that with me. It’s too heavy and I’m too tired. Time will take care of it, like it does everything else.

His pain was his most precious and secret possession, and Six held on to it as fiercely as a jewel robbed from a corpse.

Pride brought down a lot of folks. One of these days you gon' have to turn around and look at whatever it is you running from.

It seemed to him that every time he made one choice in his life, he said no to another. All of those things he could not do or be were huddled inside of him; they might spring up at any moment, and he would be hobbled with regret.

The Lord brings us into this world naked, but I don’t suppose he means us to stay that way

Half of what’s wrong with people today is that they ain’t got no place to go that makes them peaceful. I don’t reckon you got no place like that.

God doesn't come to sit on the porch and sip lemonade. He comes to take over.

I make a point of seeing the sunset. Even if I am on duty, I go on deck to watch the sky darken into twilight. It helps me remember that this strange place is still the earth, and I am still on it.

The thing to do was to insult her or slap her or run her out into the night. She’d left him with all their children. She was holding another man’s baby in her arms. Anyone would agree that he ought to do something terrible to her, but she had been gone fifteen hours, and in that fifteen hours his life had crumbled like a lump of dry earth.

Hattie had never been easy to love. She was too quiet, it was impossible to know what she was thinking. And she was angry all of the time and so disdainful when her high expectations weren't met.

There is a particular kind of afternoon sun that exists only in autumn. A golden light drapes itself over the world of that hour. It falls through the afternoon sky, fine and faint as a swirl of cigarette smoke caught in the wind, nearly transparent. So sweet, that light, insisting softly, goldly against the windows.

You ought to go now before she wakes up,” Hattie said. She handed her daughter to Pearl. I’m in the floor, she thought.

At last, her mother and sisters exited the station and came to stand next to her. “Mama,” Hattie said. “I’ll never go back. Never.

One of these days you gon’ have to turn around and look at whatever it is you running from.

I know all of her moods and the way they play across her features, but I am still awed at the configuration of lips and eyes and cheeks that make up that face that I love. Out of all of the others I could have loved. My Sissy.

Some things you can’t apologize for, you just have to try to get around them,” Hattie replied. “For your own sake too, so you can have a little peace.

Hattie was like a lake of smooth, silvered ice, under which nothing could be seen or known.

I go above deck to watch the sky darken into twilight. It helps me remember that this strange place is still the earth, and I am still on it.

I wonder if the brass understands that people are getting killed.

I couldn't stand to be a fool a second time,' Hattie said. 'I couldn't stand it.

Hattie’s children died in the order in which they were born: first Philadelphia, then Jubilee.

She wished the man outside really were Thomas, so she and Billups could again have the same enemy and the same fear.O

She didn’t know what to make of this sporadic urgency with him. It had confounded and humiliated her for the thirty years of their marriage. These endless pregnancies. And worse, her body’s insistence on a man who was the greatest mistake of her life.

Eudine did not reply. She was indecipherable, so ageless and immaculate. Her eyes were the same caramel shade as her skin. Her face was a placid lake, such depths. A woman with a face like that could be a confessor, could be told anything, no matter how awful, and remain steady as granite.

It was important to do what needed doing, no matter the day or the circumstance.

At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity--like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.