In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband, it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.

My aunts lived on liquor and seldom felt like eating much. I don't know what's wrong about a kid stealing when he's hungry.

I could depend a lot on my shaking, though I never shimmied vulgarly and only to express myself.

I am an isolationist.

Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.

All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

I know the most terrible thing that can happen to a woman. That is the gang-up. Men put you to sleep with their drops and one man after another goes in and takes you.