They tied ribbons in our hair that matched the colors of the clothes we wore. We were as beautiful as flowers. We are never as beautiful as we were then. We have the photographs as proof. And we do need proof because as women we are at times resentful daughters, who can barely remember the days our mothers treated us as innocently as we once were.

Jamaican mothers raise their daughters to be obedient, and some of us don’t know how to be any other way even when we are women. Some of us Jamaican daughters too easily forget the days our mothers were most tender.

It’s saying exactly what you think, regardless of how it will affect the listener. Perhaps this is the language of the oppressed—the colonized, the enslaved. Maybe our kind doesn’t have time for soft words.

There is a way to be cruel that seems Jamaican to me. But I’ve heard other islanders say the same thing, so maybe it’s a Caribbean thing. Though Africans and African Americans tell me that it’s a similar way with them, so maybe it’s a black thing.

secular humanist liberal thinking.

There is so much you want to tell your friends. You want to tell them when happiness looks different than you ever imagined it could—that what you had been waiting for, how you were expecting love to feel and to look, doesn’t compare to another version that is altogether a surprise and nevertheless, unbeknownst to you, what you had been waiting for

Maybe, she thought, it was sacrilege for daughters to discuss their sex lives with their mothers, and what a daughter needed was not a confidante but a woman who loved her enough to show her some of the harshness that the world was ready and able to give her.