A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.