Zee Edgell Quotes

We creoles are so different, one from the other, that it's hard for us to mix properly amongst ourselves, let alone among Carib people who have a lot more things in common. Maybe its because Carib people remind us of what we lost trying to get up in the world. See, in the old days, according to Granny Straker, the more you left behind the old ways, the more acceptable you were to the powerful people in the government and the churches who had the power to change a black person's life.

Anyone could spare the time, stopped whatever they were doing to watch the funeral go by. It was a custom. It was important to know who had died, under what circumstances, to whom the person was related, and who the mourners were following the hearse, and why they felt the need to attend this particular funeral. There were few events that commanded the total attention of the community as much as a passing funeral. Its size was commented upon, and the life story of the deceased, whatever was known of it, whispered from person to person. It was more than a funeral they watched. In a way, it was a small lesson in community history, and everyone, for those minutes, was a diligent scholar.

When the rains finally came that drought year, Beka's Dad tried to persuade Lilla to concentrate on bougainvillea, crotons, and hibiscus. Plants like these grew easily and luxuriantly in the yard, but Lilla kept those trimmed back, and continued to struggle year after year in her attempt to cultivate roses like those she saw in magazines which arrived in the colony three months late from England.

It was a relatively tolerant town where at least six races with their roots in other districts of the country, in Africa, the West Indies, Central America, Europe, North America, Asia, and other places, lived in a kind of harmony. In three centuries, miscegenation, like logwood, had produced all shades of black and brown, not grey or purple or violet, but certainly there were a few people in town known as red ibos. Creole regarded as a language to be proud of by most people in the country, served as a means of communication amongst the races. Still, in the town and in the country, as people will do everywhere, each race held varying degrees of prejudice concerning the others.

What Beka recognized in herself as 'change' began, as far as she could remember, the day she decided to stop lying.

We can't sit down and keep rehashing what people did to us in the past, Ma, or use those injustices as any kind of complete excuse for our present situation. Every people have some kind of grievance. Fighting for our rights is a natural thing, but things don't often go according to rights, and rights have to be maintained one way or another. My main worry is, will we be able to hold onto our rights once we get them? Only the good-will of the world will help us do that in our present situation.

If Father Nunez had been a little more open, a little more understanding, a little more self-confident, a little more Belizean, it is possible that he could have performed a miracle greater than his lonely journey from Xaicotz to Rome. But he was human and not only that, he was a pioneer and pioneers in non-traditional fields of endeavor generally inhabit an uncertain place. They are faced with complex choices. Should they forsake the old for the new? This seems simpler, at first, but the emotional cost of attempting to reject one's nuture is dear. Should they hold tightly to the old and shut out the new? How can this be done when they are no longer entirely 'the old'? It is only time, experience, and emotional maturity that teaches some pioneers to try and graft the best of the old onto the best of the new. What is the best of the old, and the best of the every-changing new? That selection takes generations to evolve, and the task is never done.

Peace and happiness!' Miss Ivy was laughing an ugly laugh that hurt Beka's ear. She jumped off the platform and went to stand a the kitchen door. There was a hurt look on Lilla's face, and seeing it, Granny Ivy said, in a much softened voice, 'Those things only visit in spells, Lilla, best to accept it. I have lived these sixty odd years, and I haven't yet met anyone at peace or happy. I don't even know what happiness means. Far as I can make out, it's like love, there when you need it less, gone when you need it more. Hope is the one reliable thing I know.