Barbara Neely > Quotes

“Love and sex, honey. Either one can make you do the damndest things. The two combined will make you a sure ’nough fool.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“Anytime you get this many light-skinned black people together at least half of them are going to be folks who act light-skinned.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“He gave Blanche the cheeky “Hey, girl” greeting that teenage white boys working up to being full-fledged rednecks give grown black women in the South. Blanche hissed some broken Swahili and Yoruba phrases she'd picked up at the Freedom Library in Harlem and told the boy it was a curse that would render his penis as slim and sticky as a lizard's tongue. The look on his face and the way he clutched his crotch lifted her spirits considerably.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“The longer I live, the more boring youth becomes. So redundant. Each generation rediscovers the wheel of rebellion, the wheel of love, and so forth and so on. We hardly know which end is up until we’re in our thirties.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“Maybe his stuff was so good it made her think she could fly!”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“A family couldn’t have domestic help and secrets.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“She wondered how soon after the first baby was born of the rape of a black woman by a white man did some slaver decide that light-skinned slaves were smarter and better by virtue of white blood? And how long after that had some black people decided to take advantage of that myth?”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“Southern law enforcement people were even worse: the descendants of the paddyrollers and overseers who’d made their living grinding her kind into fertilizer in the cotton fields of slavery.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“She knew from other places she'd worked that rich people liked owning things made by different kinds of people--Africans, Eskimos, Native Americans. It didn't seem to matter what the object looked like, or to what gory purpose it might have been put, as long as it had belonged to some other people first, and as long ago as possible.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“In this town, white politicians and black ministers seemed to go together like tears and tissues. At election time, the pols got religion and came looking for the blessings of black ministers as a way to get black votes without providing the kinds of services to black communities that they at least promised to East Boston and Charlestown and the other mostly white Boston neighborhoods.”
― Barbara Neely

“How could he ever be her friend and not understand this very basic part of who she was? Would he have a friend who chose to marry someone who hated people with Down’s syndrome? But, of course, white folks in this country are trained to believe they can have it both ways, like stealing the Indian’s land while claiming to admire the Noble Savage. “Listen,”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Passes Go

“Blanche stared at Emmeline’s door for a few moments, bristling with the desire to knock and trying to conquer her natural inclination to defy the voice of authority. It was one of the reasons she had not lasted in the waitressing, telephone sales, clerking, and typing jobs she’d tried over the years.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“Cousin Murphy was responsible for Blanche’s becoming Night Girl, when Cousin Murphy found eight-year-old Blanche crying because some kids had teased her about being so black. “Course they tease you!” Cousin Murphy had told Blanche. She’d leaned over the crouching child as she spoke. Blanche could still smell her Midnight Blue perfume and see her breasts hanging long and lean from her tall, thin frame. “Them kids is just as jealous of you as they can be! That’s why they tease you,” Cousin Murphy had told her. “They jealous ’cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in ’em, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, got dusk. But it’s only them that’s got night can become invisible. People what got night in ’em can step into the dark and poof—disappear! Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not. Shoot, girl, no wonder them kids teasing you. I’m a grown woman and I’m jealous, too!” Cousin Murphy’s explanation hadn’t stopped kids from calling her Ink Spot and Tar Baby. But Cousin Murphy and Night Girl gave Blanche a sense of herself as special, as wondrous, and as powerful, all because of the part of her so many people despised, a part of her that she’d always known was directly connected to the heart of who she was.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“There are no fools out here, she thought, only a whole lot of ways of getting to the same place.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“For many years, Blanche worried that it was fear which sometimes made her reluctant to meet white people's eyes, particularly on days when she had the loneliest or the unspecified blues. She'd come to understand that her desire was to avoid pain, a pain so old, so deep, its memory was carried not in her mind, but in her bones. Some days she simply didn't want to look into the eyes of people likely raised to hate, disdain, or fear anyone who looked like her. It was not always useful to be in touch with race memory. The thought of her losses sometimes sucked the joy from her life for days at a time.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“Her questions about whether Palmer would have raped her if she hadn’t been taking a forbidden bath on the job, if she’d remembered to lock the bathroom door, if she had tried to fight despite his knife—all her secret worry that it was these mistakes, her mistakes, that had caused her rape—were revealed to her as utter and total bullshit. If she’d been strutting down the street buck-naked, he didn’t have a right to touch her. No. If that woman across the street told her husband he was the worst fuck in history and gave him dog food for dinner, he didn’t have a right to hit her. No. Just because women were blamed for everything but good luck didn’t give nobody a right to do them wrong. And it didn’t mean they were supposed to take it when they were done wrong. All this woman-hurting shit had to stop. “Stop!”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Passes Go

“She remembered the wanted posters for Joanne Little, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur. She blushed at putting herself in such important company, then wondered if the sheriff’s office appreciated the distinction.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“But given the many shapes and forms the back door could take, she was pretty sure he’d already been through a couple of them, whether he knew it or not. Was it even possible to grow up a poor black man in America and avoid the back door?”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Cleans Up

“Nowadays, people wanted to tell you class didn't exist and color didn't matter anymore. Look at Miss America and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Miss America and the chairman were no more black people than Mother Teresa was white people. Men like Nate and women like her were the people, the folks, the mud from which the rest were made. It was their hands and blood and sweat that had built everything, from the North Carolina governor's mansion to the first stoplight.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“They jealous ’cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in ’em, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, got dusk. But it’s only them that’s got night can become invisible. People what got night in ’em can step into the dark and poof—disappear! Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“She was suspicious of anyone who was pushing not one, not two, but three male-led religions rolled into one.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Cleans Up

“The story might sound like common gossip when told by another person, but in the mouth of a storyteller, gossip was art.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“Blanche’s mind rang with remembered slights and taunts, and”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Passes Go

“She was a thin, sharp-boned woman who reminded Blanche of ribbon candy—all curves and gloss”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Cleans Up

“Today’s national movements, women’s and blacks’, seem more interested in being players in the white male club than challenging the white male patriarchy.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“She’d once asked a black psychologist whose house she’d cleaned on Long Island about black people’s attachment to clothes. She’d told Blanche it probably was partly due to African peoples’ belief in body adornment in a spiritual way, and partly because, consciously or unconsciously, black people in America hoped clothes would make them acceptable to people who hated them no matter what they wore.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“If a way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, surely the way to a mother’s heart was through her children.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“The morning sunlight lay in slivers on the bedroom floor, cut to ribbons by the bamboo blind.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“In Blanche’s experience, the more a person believed love was a part of what they got from their employer, the more likely it was that the person was being asked to do things that only love could justify.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Cleans Up

“Sometimes it’s hard being dark-skinned, just like it’s sometimes hard to be any shade of brown or yellow. But it’s not awful. We’re just as cute and wonderful as anyone else.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth