I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon-everything belonged to the men who had the guns. . . . So you protected yourself and loved small. . . . A woman, a child, a brother-a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. . . . To get to a place where you could love anything you chose-not to need permission for desire-well now, that was freedom

Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.

But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.