Quotes from Barbara Neely

No matter how old we get, life's always got a lesson for you. Most likely one you've learned ten times before.

For just once in my life, I'd like to get through a whole week without having to deal with some fool, white or black, who's got an attitude about the way I look.

Love and sex, honey. Either one can make you do the damndest things. The two combined will make you a sure 'nough fool.

He gave Blanche the cheeky "Hey, girl" greeting that teenage white boys working up to being full-fledged rednecks give grown black women in the South. Blanche hissed some broken Swahili and Yoruba phrases she'd picked up at the Freedom Library in Harlem and told the boy it was a curse that would render his penis as slim and sticky as a lizard's tongue. The look on his face and the way he clutched his crotch lifted her spirits considerably.

Anytime you get this many light-skinned black people together at least half of them are going to be folks who act light-skinned.

She knew from other places she'd worked that rich people liked owning things made by different kinds of people--Africans, Eskimos, Native Americans. It didn't seem to matter what the object looked like, or to what gory purpose it might have been put, as long as it had belonged to some other people first, and as long ago as possible.

Southern law enforcement people were even worse: the descendants of the paddyrollers and overseers who'd made their living grinding her kind into fertilizer in the cotton fields of slavery.

She wondered how soon after the first baby was born of the rape of a black woman by a white man did some slaver decide that light-skinned slaves were smarter and better by virtue of white blood? And how long after that had some black people decided to take advantage of that myth?

A family couldn't have domestic help and secrets.

The longer I live, the more boring youth becomes. So redundant. Each generation rediscovers the wheel of rebellion, the wheel of love, and so forth and so on. We hardly know which end is up until we're in our thirties.

She remembered the wanted posters for Joanne Little, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur. She blushed at putting herself in such important company, then wondered if the sheriff's office appreciated the distinction.

Blanche stared at Emmeline's door for a few moments, bristling with the desire to knock and trying to conquer her natural inclination to defy the voice of authority. It was one of the reasons she had not lasted in the waitressing, telephone sales, clerking, and typing jobs she'd tried over the years.

They jealous 'cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in 'em, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, got dusk. But it's only them that's got night can become invisible. People what got night in 'em can step into the dark and poof—disappear! Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not.

Nowadays, people wanted to tell you class didn't exist and color didn't matter anymore. Look at Miss America and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Miss America and the chairman were no more black people than Mother Teresa was white people. Men like Nate and women like her were the people, the folks, the mud from which the rest were made. It was their hands and blood and sweat that had built everything, from the North Carolina governor's mansion to the first stoplight.

In this town, white politicians and black ministers seemed to go together like tears and tissues. At election time, the pols got religion and came looking for the blessings of black ministers as a way to get black votes without providing the kinds of services to black communities that they at least promised to East Boston and Charlestown and the other mostly white Boston neighborhoods.

Today's national movements, women's and blacks', seem more interested in being players in the white male club than challenging the white male patriarchy.

There are no fools out here, she thought, only a whole lot of ways of getting to the same place.

The morning sunlight lay in slivers on the bedroom floor, cut to ribbons by the bamboo blind.

The story might sound like common gossip when told by another person, but in the mouth of a storyteller, gossip was art.

How could he ever be her friend and not understand this very basic part of who she was? Would he have a friend who chose to marry someone who hated people with Down's syndrome? But, of course, white folks in this country are trained to believe they can have it both ways, like stealing the Indian's land while claiming to admire the Noble Savage. "Listen

Sometimes it's hard being dark-skinned, just like it's sometimes hard to be any shade of brown or yellow. But it's not awful. We're just as cute and wonderful as anyone else.

In Blanche's experience, the more a person believed love was a part of what they got from their employer, the more likely it was that the person was being asked to do things that only love could justify.

She was a thin, sharp-boned woman who reminded Blanche of ribbon candy—all curves and gloss

But given the many shapes and forms the back door could take, she was pretty sure he'd already been through a couple of them, whether he knew it or not. Was it even possible to grow up a poor black man in America and avoid the back door?