Maud Martha

And birthdays, with their pink and white cakes and candles, strawberry ice cream, and presents wrapped up carefully and tied with wide ribbons: whereas here was this man, who never considered giving his own mother a birthday bouquet, and dropped in his wife’s lap a birthday box of drugstore candy (when he thought of it) wrapped in the drugstore gre

And the theater itself! It was no palace, no such Great Shakes as the Tivoli out south, for instance (where many colored people went every night). But you felt good sitting there, yes, good, and as if, when you left it, you would be going home to a sweet-smelling apartment with flowers on little gleaming tables; and wonderful silver on night-blue v

Was her attitude uncooperative? Should she be wanting to sacrifice more, for the sake of her man? A procession of pioneer women strode down her imagination; strong women, bold; praiseworthy, faithful, stout-minded; with a stout light beating in the eyes. Women who could stand low temperatures. Women who would toil eminently, to improve the lot of t

How she loved a “hike.” Especially in the evening, for then everything was moody, odd, deliciously threatening, always hunched and ready to close in on you but never doing so. East of Cottage Grove you saw fewer people, and those you did see had, all of them (how strange, thought Maud Martha), white faces. Over there that matter of mystery and hunc

The people drank and nibbled, while they discussed the issues of the day, sorting, rejecting, revising. Then they went home, quietly, elegantly. They retired to homes not one whit less solid or…

She was on Fifth Avenue whenever she wanted to be, and she it was who rolled up, silky or furry, in the taxi, was assisted out, and stood, her next step nebulous, before the theaters of the thousand lights, before velvet-lined impossible shops; she it was. New York, for Maud Martha, was a symbol. Her idea of it stood for what she felt life ought to

Brooks calls the book’s thirty-four chapters ‘tiny stories’. Like a sonnet sequence, each story delights in sensory and emotional details and each reveals another aspect of Maud Martha.

“I am not a pretty woman,” said Maud Martha. “If you married a pretty woman, you could be the father of pretty children. Envied by people. The father of beautiful children.” “But I don’t know,” said Paul. “Because my features aren’t fine. They aren’t regular. They’re heavy. They’re real Negro features. I’m light, or at least I can claim to be a sor

This lady did the honors of the teacup and cookie crock each afternoon, with or without company. She would spread a large stool with a square of lace, deck it with a low bowl of artificial flowers, a teacup or teacups, the pot of tea, sugar, cream and lemon, and the odd-shaped crock of sweet crackers.