Sublime

But Alice had been an idiot. She’d always known her mother was hiding something; that was why she’d gone through Julia’s drawers while she was in middle school. She’d thought the secret was Julia’s, though, and had nothing to do with her.

Her mother had studied her quizzically one morning and said, “You don’t look feminine at all.” Alice had laughed and said, “It’s 1997, Mom. I don’t need to look feminine.”

Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.

She had the impulse to ask her professor “whether women were somehow always already dead,

Alice told herself: If I stop asking questions, I’ll stop growing.

April had been to several private schools and each time had been asked to leave. She didn’t believe in authority and was a born radical.

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

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