"What for?" I said. "What for, Tante Lou? He treated me the same way he treated her. He wants me to feel guilty, just as he wants her to feel guilty. Well, I'm not feeling guilty, Tante Lou. I didn't put him there. I do everything I know how to do to keep people like him from going there. He's not going to make me feel guilty."

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

"You going back," she said. "You ain't going to run away from this, Grant."

I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I'm trying to figure out what manliness really is.

Now, about that mulatto teacher and me. There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything. He hated me, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I didn't like him, but I needed him, needed him to tell me something that none of the others could or would.

When I'm sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.

A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth - and that's a myth.