Memphis Tara Stringfellow Quotes

Miriam thought her the most entitled white women she had met—uninteresting, her life so intertwined with that of her husband’s that she was no longer distinguishable as a woman.

History had awakened me to the fact that racism is the only food Americans crave.

walls shook with the laughter. Laughter that was, in and of itself, Black. Laughter that could break glass. Laughter that could uplift a family. A cacophony of Black female joy in a language private to them.

Men and death. Men and death. How on earth y'all run the world when all y'all have ever done is kill each other?

Then almost raised her hand to her left brow, still tender, covered in cheap Maybelline foundation not her shade because no drugstore ever carried her shade.

The things women do for the sake of their daughters. The things women don’t. The shame of it all. The shame of her daughter’s rape, the shame of her husband’s violence, her nephew’s psychopathy.

I didn’t want that, either—poverty and the shame it brings—but I was willing to risk being chronically poor the rest of my life so that I could draw. Art mattered more to me than anything else. If there was a chance I could make it work, that I might make a living off it, however meager, I had to try.

It's a sight, ain't it? And after all these years, I can't get used to it. Mountains. How did they even come to be? Sometimes I sit in that shop all day wondering. Don't make no sense to me how a fella can question the existence of God waking up to mountains like that every morning. All the proof I need.

She qualified but had refused to go on food stamps. Pride. She almost laughed out loud now. Counting Wolf, her household had grown by three humans and one canine in a single morning.

For years in this country there was no one for black men to vent their rage on except black women. And for years black women accepted that rage—even regarded that acceptance as their unpleasant duty. But in doing so, they frequently kicked back, and they seem never to have become the “true slave” that white women see in their own history. True, the black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept. And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself. —Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” The New York Times, 1971

The butterflies are what solidified my fascination. Small and periwinkle-blue, they danced within the canopy. The butterflies were African violets come alive. It was the finishing touch to a Southern symphony all conducted on a quarter-acre plot.

I had gotten the revenge I had waited my entire life for, and yet, I was disgusted with myself. Had I done this? Created this evil? Lord only knew. And I prayed he would forgive me. Because no matter what Derek had done to me, to others, to Memphis, that nigga's trauma could never heal mine.

Not adult, but on the crisp cusp of it, burgeoning with masculinity. It shocked us. We hadn’t heard a male voice in days except for Al Green’s over the radio and that white man at the gas station a half day’s drive back. It was like a predator had suddenly announced its presence in our new safe haven.

But no one, not even God, could sit there and explain to me why that boy had held me down on the floor of his bedroom seven years before.

hated that fact. That he belonged to us—to me. Bile crept into my belly, and I swallowed hard to hold it in.

She preferred to be studying. Chemistry. Physics. Anatomy. This was a summer job—a gig to make some money in between her college graduation and the start of nursing school that fall.

Jax had been shocked—Mazz was the first white boy he had ever met that didn’t either try to spit on him or kill him. Being spat upon by their drill sergeants instead, they felt a kinship—both hated for their bloodline and both hailing from one of the greatest cities in the world.

The women of all shades who had come to Auntie August’s shop not for their usual presses, but for the relief of cornrows and Bantu knots and box braids. I wanted to draw Mya and the cats in the green trees. Now that school was out

They could not understand that smart planning and the sheer fact that humans will always need bread were the reasons Stanley’s did not have to shutter.

Stanley, why on earth you got niggers dancing in here? Even got nigger music on. And here I thought the flood was the end of the world.

Every day, Derek looked more and more like his father. He was tall and dark and brooding. And every day, just like his father, he bored deeper into crime.

I had always coveted darker-skinned women their color. There was a mystery to their beauty that I found hypnotizing, Siren-like. They were hardly ever in Jet or Ebony or Essence, the magazines we subscribed to, unless they themselves were famous—the mom from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Joyner, Oprah. Most of the Black women the public pronounced beautiful looked like Mama. Black Barbies. Bright. Hair wavier than curly. Petite figures.

Della, a grown and determined and brilliant woman, reduced to that colored girl in North Memphis who makes them fancy dresses.

Hazel Rose, you look at me now", Myron said. He raised Hazel's head with the tip of his index finger. "You remember the first thing I ever said to you?" "You all kinds of crazy". Myron gave a small laugh. "It was 'I got you'. I meant that. You hear me? I meant that.

If she had to serve, had to work for her bread and water, then, goddamnit, she'd serve her own.

If she had to serve, had to work for her bread and butter, then, goddamnit, she'd serve her own.

All Hazel could remember, after he had removed her lace gown and laid her down on a quilt her mother had made for them, was that a man and a woman together, loving, reminded her of butter pecan ice cream.

Earlier that day, cleaning out the catfish entrails, Hazel had grieved her mother. Hazel knew loss. Grief was all she had left of her mother. Noting to be done about it but miss the woman. But that early evening on the front porch, Hazel came to know rage. It was not Myron's time. Nothing natural took her husbadn. No heart attack, no old age, no cancer. This white man had taken him. That and only that, became Hazel's mania.

Maybe I wasn't so different from Daddy. an unpleasant thought. Maybe he'd even made me this way, I realized, angrily. But my rage came partly from fear. That reassured me until I considered, with a start, that maybe that wasn't so different from my father, after all.

To Miss Gianna Floyd - I wrote you a black fairytale I understand if you not ready to read it yet or if your mama told you wait a bit and that just fine this book aint going nowhere this book gon be right here whoever you want it whenever you get finished playing outside in that bright beautiful world your daddy loved so much child, it's just right to set this aside Lord knows not a soul on this earth gon blame you for being out in it -- running laughing breathing

All of us now seated at the kitchen booth, I held my mug and sipped my coffee, never taking a raised eyebrow off Daddy, seated across from me. As a girl, I had loved him more than I loved drawing. At fifteen, I realized he had brought us nothing but pain

All of us now seated at the kitchen booth, I held my mug and sipped my coffee, never taking a raised eyebrow off Daddy, seated across from me. As a girl, I had loved him more than I loved drawing. At fifteen, I realized head brought us nothing but pain.

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.’ Hebrews thirteen-two,” she read.

All she knew was that she hadn’t prepared for how lonely marriage could be.

But in the very pit of her, in her veins and arteries and sinews, she knew she loved this unknown man.

Free?” Her laugh was steeped in the same bitterness when I had asked her about God. “A Black woman hasn’t ever known the meaning of that word, my love.

their daughters. The things women don’t. The shame of it all. The shame of her daughter’s rape, the shame of her husband’s violence, her nephew’s psychopathy.

The anger I had felt for years at my father was what I had had instead of him. It was all I had of him. So, I carried it with me always, like a rose quartz in my palm. And it was slowly disappearing, my quartz. Growing tiny. I was hardly feeling the rough edges of it anymore. I realized, as time passed in the kitchen, the grandfather clock in the parlor having sung its swan song three times now, that love was wearing me down. Love, like a tide, just washing over and over that piece of

But she knew her girls knew. Understood the impact of the fatherless journey they were taking

Now that he had arrived in the South, he told Miriam, he didn’t understand how anyone could ever leave it.

But she’d fight Satan for me, tiny fists balled up and unafraid.

I’d rather have had a father, frankly. The fact that he could leave us mystified me. Yes, we had fled in a van. But why the hell hadn’t he pursued? Why hadn’t he fought for us? Why didn’t he ever visit Memphis? Why did he care more about his career than us, than me? Why had he given Mama a black eye? He had turned the thing damn near purple.

Derek never confirmed his involvement with the Douglass Park Bishops, but he did not have to. The judge, the Honorable Dorothy White, was from the streets of Memphis, knew that a seventeen-year-old boy does not own an AK-47; that weapon had been gifted. She, and the jury, also knew that a boy from North Memphis had no valid, reasonable reason to even be in Orange Mound, much less with an automatic weapon used in warfare, all to kill two people he had never met. The jury took all of thirty minutes to issue a guilty verdict; didn’t even need to break for lunch.

My lovely, beautiful daughters, both of you can always, always come home.

God talks to every baby when they’re born. Every single one. But I believe He talks to some a bit longer. Whispers something only He can understand, I suppose. Some magic bestowed to certain children. You one of them. You and the whole North clan, really. Though don’t a one of y’all see it.

That is what broke Miriam. Where shame met motherhood. She had snapped at her child for simply wanting to exist as a child.

I had to come here. Had to see you. I was sick of all the death, don’t you see? Everywhere I go, there’s a war.

Never knew it could be the sun itself, stretching on and on, warming us all.

It was as if she held a broken teacup in her hands but couldn’t remember breaking it and had no idea how to mend it.

As I drove, the demands of my art class dwindled away. I lost track of time. I began to fall in love with driving, with the power it gave me.

Yes, you said. But poets can tell stories, too. You remember me asking, demanding you start over, repeat what you had just read? And you did. In a clear, ringing voice. Once upon a midnight dreary…So thank you, Pops.

And wasn’t it you who always made sure, no matter how poor we were, no matter how meager the meal on the table, that I always had a fresh writing journal? What a mother you are. What a woman you are.

I will say it again: Every human being on this earth needs a sibling like a sailor needs a compass. How y’all have been my North Stars. How I’d wander without y’all.

I have no idea how or why. But I’m Catholic. So, I reckon a large part of me believes wholeheartedly in miracles, and thus, in angels.

You have done me, my kin, and the city of Memphis a great honor by publishing these words. So I thank you. With everything that’s in me, I thank you.

Don’t make no sense to me how a fella can question the existence of God waking up to mountains like that every morning. All the proof I need.

August understood that the summer meant blood. School was out. The heat was driving folk crazy. Intermittent gunshots could be heard throughout Douglass at all hours of the day.

Stubborn as anything. Nine months pregnant in August in Memphis. Stubborn as all hell.

In that long moment, I truly believed that my parents, in some past time, would have crossed the Sahara for each other. Arms outstretched, seeking each other out before water.

She noticed that even after they were married, they didn’t behave like the married folk Hazel knew. Often, Myron would chase her around the house he built for her, Hazel’s laughter filling the home, until he had successfully tackled her on their four-poster bed. Sometimes, Hazel would stay up waiting for Myron after a late shift, and they’d sit at the kitchen booth over cigarettes and drink coffee and talk of things to come.

The nearness of the Mississippi made the humidity an enemy of most Memphis women. They needed their edges and curls tended to more often in the sweltering heat that words could not describe.

How can Mama not see that? I wondered silently. How can she not see that I may just be great at it? That just maybe a dark-skinned skinny girl from North Memphis can draw something

I will help you, niece. And I’ll work on your mama. Win her over. Guess I must. Because you have a gift. I think it’s high time somebody in this damn family with a gift use it.

Killing my son won’t bring back nobody from the dead. You know this. And y’all going to kill him? That’s the question we came down here for today? How? How, after this, how y’all going to sleep at night?” She turned now to the room at large, her arms outstretched, challenging,

History had awakened me to the fact that racism is the only food Americans crave. Mornings in class with Mr. Harrison had taught me that Americans had reduced the world’s most elite soldiers to a single word: Jap. I had grown up hearing my father’s Marine friends, even Uncle Mazz, use Haji. I wasn’t having any of it in this house. I was prepared to deal with the fallout, the blowback of sassing an elder and kin, but—To hell with it, I thought. I wasn’t having any of that low ignorance up in my house. Especially not from him.

Girl. Hazel tensed. It was instinctive. She knew, without having to turn around, that the man was white—which was just a synonym for a death warrant in the South.

All colors were unable to compete with the blue glory of these Tennessee mountains. She was home, or close to

Talking Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, they agreed how none of them, not a single one of those white boys, could write a sentence as good as Zora Neale Hurston.

Because you’re the most fascinating girl—woman—I’ve ever met. And it’d be an honor. I think it would be an honor. And that’s just fine if you need more time. Take your time. But I know. I just know. Can’t really explain it. Say, sometimes you just know a thing. And listen, I’ll be honest. I can’t say I’m a good man. I’m not. I hung around some rough folk back in Chicago. I’m not sure I even know what love is, what it looks like. But I do know, what I know more than I know myself, is that I would spurn God for you. So. Who do I need to ask? For your hand?

Myron had been murdered. By members of the very force who had sworn to protect and defend and honor.

Nothing natural took her husband. No heart attack, no old age, no cancer. This white man had taken him. That, and only that, became Hazel’s mania.

If Memphis were alive, gangs would be both her red and white blood cells—killing and healing and repeating.

She did something then that was unheard of in Memphis—unheard of anywhere in the South without death following like a shadow. Hazel looked at the white man. Full-on. She twisted her head around and threw her eyes directly at the large white man behind her. Beheld him without bent head or lowered gaze or blinking eye.

There were two types of military wives, in Miriam’s opinion—those who supported their husbands and those who thought they, too, were Marines. Brooke was squarely in the latter set. Attended every officer’s wife function—high teas and luncheons and charity drives and golf outings. She ran the Camp Lejeune Toys for Tots Christmas program as if she were Britain’s prime minister during the war. Miriam thought her the most entitled white women she had met—uninteresting, her life so intertwined with that of her husband’s that she was no longer distinguishable as a woman.

Men and death. Men and death. How on earth y’all run the world when all y’all have ever done is kill each other?

She had the same doe eyes, the same shade of brown skin; she even bit her lip the same way when she was deep in concentration. She was beginning to grow hips that she expected would eventually turn into the curved vase of her mother’s figure.

During the crash of ’29, Stanley’s deli did not go bankrupt. This simple financial fact infuriated white Memphis. They could not understand that smart planning and the sheer fact that humans will always need bread were the reasons Stanley’s did not have to shutter. It did not matter; the Klan shuttered it for him. Set fire to the building one night. The next day, all of Douglass, thousands of Black hands, came out to help Stanley rebuild, brick by brick. Even Hazel, just eight years old then, had swept ash from the foundation.

I just don’t want you to be poor, Joanie. You can draw. Lord knows, you can draw. But if a man up and leaves you…or you up and leave him, how will you survive? Selling sketches in the streets? Name me one successful artist with a dark face. With breasts. Name one Black woman famous artist. Go on. I’ll wait. Be a doctor, Joan. For Christ’s sake. Be a doctor.

I’ll drive the damn Shelby myself if I have to, but my daughter”—Miriam, still on the floor, rubbed her eight-month-swollen belly affectionately—“will be born in Memphis.

Miriam realized, with relief and horror, that her worst fear—Joan’s being taken away from her—was no more than fantasy. She doubted that this man would ever give a damn about the life of a Black child.

Because what kind of God lets an auntie leave her screaming niece in a car? What kind of God would make a Black woman choose a thing like that? What kind of God would allow her sister to stay with a man like this?

Laughter that was, in and of itself, Black. Laughter that could break glass. Laughter that could uplift a family. A cacophony of Black female joy in a language private to them.

There were two types of military wives, in Miriam’s opinion—those who supported their husbands and those who thought they, too, were Marines.

Will you love her, is what I’m concerned about,” her mother was saying. “Treat her right? Do for her and care for her? Be there when she’s sick and when she’s lonesome?” “You’re an Edith Wharton fan, ma’am?” “You’re literate, then. Well, at least that’s something. Wasn’t sure what y’all Northerners were taught in school. Or if at all.” “I love her,” the Marine said simply.

Miriam was sick of grieving. Sick of seeing her dead mother all over the house in Memphis. Miriam saw her as if in the flesh, standing in the kitchen over a pot of something hot and boiling on the stove. Or once, she thought there was someone in the backyard, and she swore she saw her mother there, among the tomatoes, straw hat on and everything.

I can provide for Miriam.’ ” August’s mother laughed. “Miriam can provide for Miriam. Lord knows, I didn’t raise a silly girl. It’s not even so much she would be forsaking Southwestern—

He had always been a natural storyteller, born out of his sense of ease with other people and himself. Right now, though, he seemed nearly unaware of his surroundings, in a state different from his usual one, in which he catered to his listeners and drew belly laughs. Miriam understood: He wasn’t telling this story for her.

I never knew a smile could be another, better thing until I saw Mya’s face. Never knew it could be the sun itself, stretching on and on, warming us all.