From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

One of the monstrous things that slavery in this country caused was the breakup of families. I mean, physical labor, horrible; beatings, horrible; lynching death, all of that, horrible. But the living life of a parent who, A, has no control over what happens to your children, none. They don't belong to you. You may not even nurse them. They may be shipped off somewhere, as in "Beloved" the mother was, to be nursed by somebody who was not able to work in the fields and was a wet nurse.

I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.

I am a moralist. I worry.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.