I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Dear God...I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.