Charity Mack

“I don’t resemble my mom at all. Mom made beauty seem like a magic trick I’d never learn. I think there was a part of me that was trying, in those moments, to know her deeply, deep enough so that I could one day bring to light any small part of me that was hers. —”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“She knew what I wanted, and she wanted me to know it would not be mine. We were locked in a power struggle, not that I would have known to call it that, and I was confused because I did not want power from my mother. I wanted her to acknowledge the pain in my body and heart. I wanted it to mean something to her because she loved me, and I knew it, and I couldn't understand why she couldn't just say sorry. What was so wrong with me that I didn't deserve that?”
― Ashley C. Ford, Somebody's Daughter

“Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Before there is science, there are stories to explain the world. They make it happier somehow.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me