The Mothers Brit Bennett Quotes

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip. —

The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains.

Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

It was strange learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.

Suffering pain is what made you a woman. Most of the milestones in a woman’s life were accompanied by pain, like her first time having sex or birthing a child. For men, it was all orgasms and champagne.

But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain’t-shit man. No Christian way of putting it. There are two types of men in the world: men who are and men who ain’t about shit.

Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around.

She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn't want was a haunting.

Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

She'd already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn't yet learned how to navigate the difference.

A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her like a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing.

An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in an outside way you couldn’t hide.

Her father propped his sadness on a pew, but she put her sad in places no one could see.

No shame in loving an ain’t-shit man, long as you get it out your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain’t-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him. Yes,

In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?

sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying.

niceness was something anyone could be, whether they meant it or not. But goodness was another thing altogether.

Soft things can take a beating. But you push somethin’ hard a little bit and it shatters. You gotta be a soft thing in love. Hard love don’t last.

After a secret’s been told, everyone becomes a prophet.

This had always frightened her about marriage: how satisfied married people seemed, how unable they were to ask for more. She couldn’t imagine feeling satisfied.

He liked to refer to his whiteness the way all white liberals did: only acknowledging it when he felt oppressed by it, otherwise pretending it didn't exist.

Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full.

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.

Black boys couldn’t afford to be reckless, she had tried to tell him. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She’s her mother’s age now. Double her age. Our age. You’re our mother. We’re climbing inside of you.

All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.

She refused to let him bury his guilt in her. She would not be a burying place for any man again.

Sometimes she wondered if she only loved him when it was cold, in the middle of winter when everything was dead. —

If you couldn't know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. He just came to sit with them while they weren't.

Bones, like anything else, strong until they weren't.

Maybe she'd never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn't know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

She always felt nervous around strange men, even though she’d known the man who’d hurt her. If a man who knew you could hurt you, who knew what a man who didn’t might do?

Would they ever spend time like that together again? Could you be nostalgic for a friendship that wasn’t over yet or did the fact that you were nostalgic mean that it already was?

Do you think—” She paused, scraping the celery into a bowl. “Do you think Daddy loved you?” “I think everybody who ever hurt me loved me,” her mother said. “Do you think he loved me?” Her mother touched her cheek. “Yes,” she said. “But I couldn’t wait around to see.

We would’ve told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more. —

It wasn't hard to move into someone else' life if you did it a little at a time.

The how of any betrayal was the hardest part to justify. How the lies can be assembled and stacked and maintained until the truth was completely hidden behind them.

These were the moments when adulthood was formed, not a birthday but the realization that she was now the one pouring a handful of candy into children’s bags, that she was now the one expected to give, not receive.

We were girls once. As hard as that is to believe. //Oh you can't see it now--our bodies have stretched and sagged, faces and necks drooping. That's what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it's from and where it'll return.

years later, she wondered if that was the point, if sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying. The

...sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying.

She licked cinnamon sugar off her fingers, sun-heavy and happy, the type of happiness that before might have felt ordinary, but now seemed fragile, like if she stood too quickly, it might slide off her shoulders and break.

She was the type of girl who never wanted to admit that she was in pain, as if not confessing it made her stronger.

A soft death can be swallowed with Called home to be with the Lord or We’ll see her again in glory, but hard deaths get caught in the teeth like gristle. We

You didn’t know how desperate you could be until you were.

Only two reasons a woman might have someone’s husband’s watch: She’s sleeping with him. She repairs watches.

An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in a way that you couldn't hide.

Maybe you didn't know who you would be in the world. Maybe you were a different person everywhere you lived.

Could you be nostalgic for a friendship that wasn’t over yet or did the fact that you were nostalgic mean that it already was?

But Aubrey didn't look scared. She seemed comfortable in her big sweater, a hand resting on her stomach, as if to remind herself that it was still there. She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn't want was a haunting.

Maybe abortion seemed different when it was just an interesting topic to write a paper about or debate over drinks, when you never imagined it might affect you.

She had always seemed a little strange to us anyway - dreamy, like her mind was a balloon on a long string and she forgot to reel it in.

We tried to love the world. We cleaned after this world, scrubbed its hospital floors and ironed its shirts, sweated in its kitchens and spooned school lunches, cared for its sick and nursed its babies. But the world didn't want us.

It’s okay to not be a big man. It’s enough to be a good one.” It

she too understood loss, how it drove you to imagine every possible scenario that might have prevented it.

Her mother was dead, but what could be worse than knowing that your mother was alive somewhere but she wanted a man who hit her more than she wanted you?

Now her sister had decided she'd rather be white and her mother blamed her because Stella was no longer there to blame.

The slap confused her less than the kiss after, her mother's anger and love colliding together so violently.

She was not a mother but she had a mother's gift of rushing to the worst possible outcome.

Now they were slow and deliberate, the way hurt people loved, stretching carefully just to see how far their damaged muscles could go.

This was the first time Kennedy realized that her mother was a liar.

He’d made her feel like love was something she had to claw her way into, but look at how easily he loved Aubrey. Well, of course he did. Aubrey was easy to love.

I think everybody who ever hurt me loved me,” her mother said.

(The type who would prefer to give a man a fish not only because she could catch a better one herself, but because she felt important being the only thing standing between that man and starvation

We tried to love the world. We cleaned after this world, scrubbed its hospital floors and ironed its shirts, sweated in its kitchens and spooned school lunches, cared for its sick and nursed its babies. But the world didn't want us, so we left and gave our love to Upper Room. Now we're afraid of this world. A boy snatched Hattie's purse one night and now none of us go out after dark. We hardly go anywhere at all, besides Upper Room. We've seen what this world has to offer. We're scared of what it wants.

Early loved her hair, so she always paid it special attention. Once, Jude had seen him ease up behind her mother and bury his face in a handful of her hair. She didn’t know who she wanted to be in that moment—Early or her mother, beautiful or beholding—and she’d felt so sick with longing that she turned away.

Why should she dress in a cap and gown and sweat in the sun, when her mother was not there to pose in pictures with her and cheer when her name was called? In her mind, she only saw pictures they would never take, arms around each other, her mother gaining little wrinkles around her eyes from smiling so much.

There was something freeing in admitting that you had been loved less. She might have gone her whole life not knowing, thinking that she was enjoying a feast when she had actually been picking at another's crumbs.

You used to be able to spot an ain't-shit man a lot easier. At pool halls and juke joints, speakeasies and rent parties and sometimes in church, snoring in the back pew. The type of man our brothers warned us about because he was going nowhere and he would treat us bad on the way to that nowhere. But nowadays? Most of these young men seem ain't-shit to us. Swaggering around downtown, drunk and swearing, fighting outside nightclubs, smoking reefer in their mamas' basements. When we were girls, a man who wanted to court us sipped coffee in the living room with our parents first. Nowadays, a young man fools around with any girl who's willing and if she gets in trouble - well, you just ask Luke Sheppard what these young men do next. A girl nowadays has to get nice and close to tell if her man ain't shit and by then, it might be too late. We were girls once. It's exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way. No shame in loving an ain't-shit man, long as you get it out of your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain't-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him. Yes, those are the ones we worry about.

We don't think of ourselves as "prayer warriors." A man must've come up with that term - men think anything difficult is war. But prayer is more delicate than battle, especially intercessory prayer. More than just a notion, taking up the burdens of someone else, often someone you don't even know. You close your eyes and listen to a request. Then you have to slip inside their body. You are Tracy Robinson, burning for whiskey. You are Cindy Harris's husband, searching your wife's phone. You are Earl Vernon, washing dirty knots out of your strung-out daughter's hair. If you don't become them, even for a second, a prayer is nothing but words.

At home, loss was everywhere; she could barely see past it, like trying to look out a windowpane covered in fingerprints. She would always feel trapped behind that window, between her and the rest of the world, but at least in Ann Arbor, the glass was clearer. Whenever

She would talk to her mother on the phone, days later, and not say a word about Stella. Maybe she was like her aunt in that way. Maybe, like Stella, she became a new person in each place she’d lived, and she was already unrecognizable to her mother, a girl who hoarded secrets. A liar.

She may hear this story, someday, and wonder what it has to do with her. A girl hiding her scared in her prettiness, an unwanted baby, a dead mother. These are not her heartbreaks. Every heart is fractured differently and she knows the pattern of her cracks, she traces them like lines across her palm. She has a living mother and besides, she was always wanted. Prayed for, even. Now she's grown, or at least she thinks she is. But she hasn't yet learned from the mathematics of grief. The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains. She's heard her granddaddy preach about the good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind in search of the one lost sheep. But what about the flock he abandons? she wonders. Aren't they lost now too?

Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full. “I’m

how small she’d looked next to the size of her wanting. “You

Aubrey wondered if they were the only ones who felt they didn’t know their mothers. Maybe mothers were inherently vast and unknowable.

He would live a small life, and instead of depressing him, the thought became comforting. For the first time, he no longer felt trapped. Instead, he felt safe. He

it scared her, how you could return home in a different body, how something big could be happening inside you and no one even knew it.

was strange, learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.

We were already mothers then, some by heart and some by womb. We rocked grandbabies left in our care and taught the neighborhood kids piano and baked pies for the sick and shut-in. We all mothered somebody.

A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. A third place. His mother, rest her soul, had hated his lightness; when he was a boy, she’d shoved him under the sun, begging him to darken. Maybe that’s what made him first dream of the town. Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift. He’d married a mulatto even lighter than himself. She was pregnant then with their first child, and he imagined his children’s children’s children, lighter still, like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. A more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before.

Once, when she was thirteen, her mother had brought her to the mall to buy a new dress for her birthday. Kennedy was beginning to pull away by then, wishing she could have gone to Bloomingdale’s with her girlfriends instead. But her mother was barely focusing on her. She paused in the middle of the shop floor, fingering the lacy sleeves of a black gown. “I love shopping,” she’d said, almost to herself. “It’s like trying on all the other people you could be.

Later, Kennedy would realize how often her mother used money to avoid discussing her past, as if poverty were so unthinkable to Kennedy that it could explain everything: why her mother owned no family photographs, why no friends from high school ever called, why they’d never been invited to a single wedding or funeral or reunion. ‘We were poor,’ her mother would snap if she asked too many questions, that poverty spreading to every aspect of her life. Her whole past, a barren pantry shelf.

Once, Jude had seen him ease up behind her mother and bury his face in a handful of her hair. She didn’t know who she wanted to be in that moment—Early or her mother, beautiful or beholding—and she’d felt so sick with longing that she turned away.

We would've told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid out all lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. The littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

She was a good woman. The more time he spent around her, the more he realized how rarely he thought anybody else was actually good. Nice, maybe, but niceness was something anyone could be, whether they meant it or not. But goodness was another thing altogether.

The twins had always seemed both blessed and cursed; they'd inherited, from their mother, the legacy of an entire town, and from their father, a legacy hollowed by loss. Four Vignes boys, all dead by thirty. The eldest collapsed in a chain gang from heatstroke; the second gassed in a Belgian trench; the third stabbed in a bar fight; and the youngest, Leon Vignes, lynched twice, the first time at home while his twin girls watched through a crack in the closet door, hands clamped over each other's mouths until their palms were misted with spit.

Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother's hand was gone and she'd fallen, clattering to the floor.

She had been his first love, so maybe, in a way, she had the rightful claim to his heart. Maybe it was like how when you stepped out of the grocery store line to grab bread, no one could really be mad when you returned to your spot. It wasn't cutting if you had been there before.

After, her father would always storm out while her mother sobbed on the floor, her face buried in the couch cushion. Once, he didn't pull away, as if she were comforted by his touch. Better to picture Lonnie beating on her. That other thing—that soft part—terrified her even more.

Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more. —

Maybe she would have been able to endure all this if it weren’t for everyone’s obsession with lightness. Syl Guillory and Jack Richard arguing in the barber shop about whose wife was fairer, or her mother yelling after her to always wear a hat, or people believing ridiculous things, like drinking coffee or eating chocolate while pregnant might turn a baby dark. Her father had been so light that, on a cold morning, she could turn his arm over to see the blue of his veins. But none of that mattered when the white men came for him, so how could she care about lightness after that?

It wasn’t a race thing. She just hated the idea of anyone telling her who she had to be. She was like her mother in that way. If she’d been born black, she would have been perfectly happy about it. But she wasn’t and who was Jude to tell her that she was somebody that she was not? Nothing had changed, really. She’d learned one thing about her mother, but what did that amount to when you looked at the totality of her life? A single detail had been moved and replaced. Swapping out one brick wouldn’t change a house into a fire station. She was still herself. Nothing had changed. Nothing had changed at all.

immeasurable cruelties. She had already been dealt her portion; she could see that Desiree’s was on its way and did not want a dark boy to hasten it. Or maybe her mother was just like everyone else who found dark skin ugly and strove to distance herself from it. Either way, Early Jones never visited again.

They only like light Negroes out there. You’d fit right in.” She’d said it so offhandedly that Kennedy almost didn’t realize it. “I’m not a Negro,” she said. Jude laughed again, this time uneasily. “Well, your mother is,” she said. “So?” “So that makes you one too.” “It doesn’t make me anything,” she said. “My father’s white, you know. And you don’t get to show up and tell me what I am.” It wasn’t a race thing. She just hated the idea of anyone telling her who she had to be. She was like her mother in that way. If she’d been born black, she would have been perfectly happy about it. But she wasn’t and who was Jude to tell her that she was somebody that she was not? Nothing had changed, really. She’d learned one thing about her mother, but what did that amount to when you looked at the totality of her life? A single detail had been moved and replaced. Swapping out one brick wouldn’t change a house into a fire station. She was still herself. Nothing had changed. Nothing had changed at all.

Nadia had invented versions of her mother’s life that did not end with a bullet shattering her brain. Her mother, no longer cradling a tiny, wrinkled body in a hospital bed, an exhausted smile on her face, but seventeen and scared, sitting inside an abortion clinic, waiting for her name to be called. Her mother, no longer her mother, graduating from high school, from college, from graduate school even. Her mother listening to lectures or delivering her own, stationed behind a podium, running a toe up the back of her calf. Her mother traveling the world, posing on the cliffs of Santorini, her arms bent toward the blue sky. Always her mother, although in this version of reality, Nadia did not exist. Where her life ended, her mother’s life began.

Shadi had driven her to the passport office to get her picture taken. He already had stamps in his from visits to France, South Africa, and Kenya, and she realized, waiting in the tiny office, that her mother had never even left the country. This would be her life, accomplishing the things her mother had never done. She never celebrated this, unlike her friends who were proud to be the first in their family to go to college or the first to earn a prestigious internship. How could she be proud of lapping her mother, when she had been the one to slow her down in the first place?

You knew she was sick,” her mother said. She was trying to comfort her or maybe just alleviate her shock. “I know,” Jude said. “Still.” “It wasn’t painful. She was smilin and talkin to me, right up until the end.” “Are you all right, Mama?” “Oh, you know me.” “That’s why I’m asking.” Her mother laughed a little. “I’m fine,” she said. “Anyway, the service is Friday. I just wanted to let you know. I know you’re busy with school—” “Friday?” Jude said. “I’ll fly down—” “Hold on. No use in you comin all the way down here—” “My grandmother is dead,” Jude said. “I’m coming home.” Her mother didn’t try to dissuade her further. Jude was grateful for that. She’d already acted as if notifying her of her grandmother’s passing had been some inconvenience. What type of life did her mother think she was living that she couldn’t interrupt with that type of news? They hung up and Jude stepped out into the hallway. Students buzzed past. A friend from the biology department waved his coffee at her as he ducked into the lounge. A weedy orange-haired girl tacked a green poster for a protest onto the announcement board. That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.

And what would she have told Early if she knew how to reach him? That she was sorry for what her mother said? Or for what she hadn’t said in his defense? That she wasn’t like the folks she’d come from, although she wasn’t sure that was even true anymore. You couldn’t separate the shame from being caught doing something from the shame of the act itself. If she hadn’t believed, even a bit, that spending time with Early was wrong, why hadn’t she ever asked him to meet her at Lou’s for a malt? Or take a walk or sit out by the riverbank? She was probably no different from her mother in Early’s eyes. That’s why he’d left town without saying good-bye.