Sublime

Neither blackness nor “people of color” stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread.

a Coming of Age story, or Bildungsroman, or maybe a Rags to Riches story—but

Then she put on a big Charity Harris smile, opening the door. She would disappear inside herself, inside these empty homes where nobody actually lived.

gauche caviar

She could neither resolve nor dismiss. There were these scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile and—this she especially regretted, called her hungriest lack—not much voice.

No one knew who had fathered her child or could fathom how she came to build such a fine house when she was a woman alone with no apparent means of support.

Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?

Here was the theory of racial equality about to be put into practice, and she only hoped she would be equal to being equal.