Posts tagged "choice" — Page 4
Determination
Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything. “You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don’t remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother’s feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can’t walk down the steps? My Jesus my.”
But you said there was no defense.
“There ain’t.”
Then what do I do?
“Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.”
~Toni Morrison, Beloved
A Grief Observed
A deep hole had opened up in front of me. I looked in but the hole was so deep and so dark that I couldn’t see the bottom. I thought, What’s down there? So on purpose I fell in. I fell and I fell, over and over as if I were an old suitcase. On the sides of the deep hole I could see things written but perhaps it was in a foreign language because I couldn’t read them. Still I fell, for I don’t know how long. As I fell I began to see that I didn’t like the way falling made me feel. Falling made me feel sick and I missed all the people I had loved. I said, I don’t want to fall anymore and I reversed myself. I was standing again on the edge of the deep hole. I looked at the deep hole and I said, You can close up now and it did.
~Jamaica Kincaid, Paris Review