Alice Randall > Quotes

“Life plots elegantly.”
― Alice Randall

“Debt Chauffeur, that's my name for him now, wants to marry me. He asked me down on bended knee, and I would have been honored - except he wants us to live in London, and he wants me to live white. I crowed at that. I laughed so hard and not a tear came. He couldn't understand it. I don't often think on how white I look; it's always been a question of how colored I feel, and I feel plenty colored. He said that no one in London will know that I'm supposed to be colored. And I said I am colored, colored black, the way I talk, the way I cook, the way I do most everything, and he said but you don't have to be. ”
― Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone

“God doesn't give a man anything more precious than a good woman.”
― Alice Randall, Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel

“We are taught to think ourselves ugly. Eyes are an assaulted sense. We are taught to behave by spankings and whippings. Touch is an assaulted sense. We are taught we should not smell, or we smell wrong. Smell is an assaulted sense. We listen to songs that call us 'hos and tell us how to give blow jobs. Hearing is an assaulted sense. Taste, not so much.”
― Alice Randall, Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel

“When a good man loves a good woman, God smiles. When a good man loves a good woman, God smiles so broad and bright that the angel guarding the gate to Eden puts down his fiery sword. I've been to busy to get to Eden. What kind of man is too busy to make God smile?”
― Alice Randall, Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel

“All the different ways of talking English I throw together like a salad and dine greedily in my mongrel tongue.”
― Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone: A Novel

“Love, Ada thought out on the lake that first spring afternoon, is largely a matter of paying attention and good timing.”
― Alice Randall, Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel

“Don't stop short of your goal”
― Alice Randall, Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel

“A man another woman can steal from you ain't your man no way”
― Alice Randall, Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel

“me if everything was all right. I replied, “Everything’s copacetic.” And it was in fact “copacetic”—our word for “fine and dandy.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“True love is a preview of heaven, and you do what you got to, to get it.”
― Alice Randall, Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel

“something make a man crawl over glass and fire to get to again after he get to it once”
― Alice Randall, Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel

“The front of my head feels like a house, and the thoughts reside within different set places that I can rearrange like furniture, but mostly I don't. I come from a furniture-dodging tribe. We tiptoe around the pieces as they remain in place. I'm thinking that way again. Strange, the small things that make us proud.”
― Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone: A Novel

“siddity”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“1952 there were over 700 cases of polio in Detroit. Dr. Bodywork Bob had told me that. I told Rouse; he bogeyed a hole. Polio was hitting families all over town, white and colored, rich and poor, center of the city and suburbs.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“She was Detroit born, and Detroit bred, and when she died, she’d be Detroit-dead. She might not have much, but she had enough.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“What I liked least about the Plantation Club? They plastered caricatures of us, drawings of darkies with protruding lips and gawking eyes on every matchbook, napkin, menu, and newspaper advertisement associated with or in the Plantation Club. Why? I suspect they hoped their filthy-as-homemade-sin visual lies would inoculate white folk from the shock of Black beauty. That left me, and many of the rest of the entertainers, exodusing for the inner sanctum of drunk.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“In reality St. Louis is located in a segregated South, filthy with paddleboat gambling, river mud, and hot white hate.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Black Bottom is a defiant, inventive, modern swagger that has everything to do with being efficient, exact, ambitious, proud—and Black. The efficient and exact part comes from the assembly lines. The inventive part comes from the breadwinners, too. We didn’t get credit for all that we invented in the factories—from processes and tools to paint colors—but we invented in the factories. In Black Bottom, we celebrated what we invented as loud as we celebrated what we built. And we celebrated what we finna do loudest.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“King’s best speeches end with a wish for inclusiveness, his wish for a place where brown, Black, white, and yellow play together and are judged by their character. I have created that place now, today, but to do it I had to throw all the white people out.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“It is past time everyone sees Negro girls can be touched by white hands without lust or anger. If Martha loses her show, that is nothing compared to what Negro girls lose every day when people don’t understand that.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“caramel Camelot.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“November 10, 1962, is a day that will go down in Black Detroit ignominy. The police invaded the Gotham Hotel in what newspapers called the biggest numbers raid in Detroit history. Not long after the hotel was raided, Lou Sarko (a man referred to in the press as Detroit’s own “Barney Rubble,” and identified as a close crony of the mobster Tony Jack Giacalone) was hired to demolish the building. With a single payment the Detroit City government simultaneously destroyed evidence of Black Camelot and enriched the white Cosa Nostra. A dying era no longer had a tombstone.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“After Basie married his Katie, she became one of the sidditiest of siddity sisters.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“particular kind of proud when they walk into a bar if they think about Bullock and all he knew about altering perception to improve reality.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“love is the strut and hate is the stumble.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Autumn is the season when you know what’s coming next is harder than what is now. In pale spring you look forward to bright summer; in hot summer to the cool of fall; in winter to the hope of spring. In fall, you watch what you have blow away.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“I have only had one better name than Santa Claus. And it was not Ziggy. It was not Joe Ziggy, it was not Stanley or Livingstone, Brother, Son, Nephew, Friend, or Mr. Johnson. I have loved all those names. My best name is Daddy.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“We were in Venice at the time of the revels before Lent. I went into the plaza wearing a mask and hood. I saw a pretty girl, dark skin, dark eyes. She smelled strong of fish and capers and fried artichokes. I kissed her for Beauty's sake. For Lady's sake. Behind the veil of the mask, in the old Jewish Quarter, I kissed her, kissed her, and didn't cry, because I know one day I will die. And I will not rise again.”
― Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone: A Novel

“Swellegant is glamour, power, originality, and more. Swellegant is graceful power completely unaligned with God or this world’s ethics. Swellegant is bursting with the pagan joy and pagan pleasure of being beautiful and fruitful.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints