Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

Even when my girls were little, we'd go down there, my grandmother tells us. And people'd be marching. The marching didn't just start yesterday. Police with those dogs, scared everybody near to death. Just once I let my girls march.

Then for a moment like so many times before this I lost the words. Watched them drop . . . No. Dissipate . . . from the air between us. Dissipate. The word has shown up on my SAT prep tests again and again until it landed in this room with us. Between my mother. And me.

Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.

As the orchestra lifted into "Darling Nikki," I took small breaths to keep tears from coming. I had not expected this --to feel the close of a chapter. The girlhood of my life over now.

But what is the father of the child supposed to do with his hands? His big open hands. Where were they supposed to go when all they wanted was to reach out for this child hug her, hide her from the world?

When you have so much real drama in your life, it's hard to think about fiction.

She said she'd chosen Santa Cruz because when se walked around the campus, she blended somehow, no one asking if she was part Negro, no one accusing her of passing for white.

What's the thing, I ask her, that would make people want to live together? People have to want it, that's all.

They had always been soft-spoken. Because they had always been afraid.

My fingers curl into fists, automatically This is the way, my mother said, of every baby's hand. I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm's—raised and fisted or Martin's—open and asking or James's—curled around a pen.

When I used to dream about that somebody they never had a face. It was more like a feeling.

Would the tragic comedy of memory ever stop replaying?

You the first in your tribe to go to college? Iris shook her head. It was a question about class. She knew that now. It was the what-are-you question. The where and what and who do you come from.

That's what up , Amari said. Read those poems in all kinds of American, son.

I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm's—raised and fisted or Martin's—open and asking or James's—curled around a pen. I

wasn't afraid of dying because dying had always been somewhere in our house, somewhere so close, we could feel the wind of it on our cheeks.

How amazing these words are that slowly come to me. How wonderfully on and on they go. Will the words end, I ask whenever I remember to. Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now, and promising me infinity.

And I can't help thinking of the birds here—how they disappear in the wintertime, heading south for food and warmth and shelter. Heading south to stay alive . . . passing us on the way

Probably still believed that if you wished hard enough you could make the impossible happen.

But now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross—a mother's love for you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in another generation's dreams. A history of fire and ash and loss. Legacy.

After the chicken is fried and wrapped in wax paper, tucked gently into cardboard shoe boxes and tied with string... After the corn bread is cut into wedges, the peaches washed and dried... After the sweet tea is poured into mason jars twisted tight and the deviled eggs are scooped back inside their egg-white beds slipped into porcelain bowls that are my mother's now, a gift her mother sends with her on the journey...

And when she says, I love you, too the South is so heavy in her mouth my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I've ever known.

My mother has a gap between her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar. Each child in this family has the same space connecting us.

I held on to my mama's Spelman College sweater. Wore it the first day I got there myself and still have it now. Held on to my own daddy's stethoscope until I pulled it out of its black leather case one winter and saw the rubber had melted into sticky pieces of nothing and the silver disk was flaked with rust. Seems all I had from them was the memories of fire and smoke.