It Was The In-between Time, Before Day

I Marvel At How Good I Was Before I Met Him, How I Lived Molded To The Smallest Space Possible, My Days The Size Of Little Beads That Passed Without Passion Through My Fingers. So Few People Know What They're Capable Of. At Forty-two I'd Never Done Anything That Took My Own Breath Away, And I Suppose Now That Was Part Of The Problem - My Chronic Inability To Astonish Myself.

Were All Yearning For A Wedge Of Sky, Aren't We? I Suspect God Plants These Yearnings In Us So We'll At Least Try And Change The Course Of Things. We Must Try, That's All.

I Vividly Remember The Summer Of 1964 With Its Voter Registration Drives, Boiling Racial Tensions, And The Erupting Awareness Of The Cruelty Of Racism. I Was Never The Same After That Summer.

Where Do You Come From?"...this Is The Number One Most-asked Question In All Of South Carolina. We Want To Know If You Are One Of Us, If Your Cousin Knows Our Cousin, If Your Little Sister Went To School With Our Big Brother, If You Go To The Same Baptist Church As Our Ex-boss. We Are Looking For Ways Our Stories Fit Together.

There Was Nothing I Hated Worse Than Clumps Of Whispering Girls Who Got Quiet When I Passed. I Started Picking Scabs Off My Body And, When I Didn't Have Any, Gnawing The Flesh Around My Fingernails Until I Was A Bleeding Wreck. I Worried So Much About How I Looked And Whether I Was Doing Things Right, I Felt Half The Time I Was Impersonating A Girl Instead Of Really Being Me.