Rojda

“Her hands may be old,” I said, “but they’re strong as boot heels.” How could they not be? They scrubbed pots and folded sheets, pulled weeds up from the ground and planted flower bulbs in the same hole. They built things, cleaned things, cooked things, tore things apart, and put them back together again in better ways. They moved things, lifted things, and bandaged them, like the cuts my sister and me got when we decided to fly off the tree in the backyard. In the quiet moments, her hands would hold our faces as she gave us ten kisses apiece. “Enough for you to always find your way back home,” she’d say.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“My dear.” Mamaw cupped Daffy’s face in her old hands. “A witch is not a pointy hat or a broom or warts. A witch is merely a woman who is punished for being wiser than a man. That’s why they burned her. They tried to burn away her power because a woman who says more than she’s supposed to say, and does more than she’s supposed to do, is a woman they’ll try to silence and destroy. But there are some things that not even fire can destroy. One of those things is the strength of a woman. Don’t you want to be a woman like that? A woman with power?”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“Then my mother will sit and wait, getting high enough to know there is little space between the past and the present. In that space, maybe I really will come back home to her. She will think this because it was my promise. But I will never come back home. I’m too dead to do a thing like that.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“All the roads here are not graveled in rock, girls, but with the woman’s scars, because only a woman’s scars are strong enough to bear something driving over them, again and again.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side