Madi > Recent Status Updates

The coloring book is titled Fun with Nursery Rhymes! and all the pictures have black outlines around them to keep you in control



—-
Meg is so funny, I loved her personality.

Lucille waves at her plate, says, I can’t eat that, and lights a cigarette instead. Woman would rather eat a cigarette than food

Slave dogs.

I skitter close to Tom and take his hand.
Can they get us? Walking through these woods, Tom?

No, no, don’t worry. No dogs will come after you with me around.

I guess that is about the best you can ask for in life. To find the person who will keep the dogs from getting you.

I mulled over her words. Live the life you want. You should have that choice. It sounded a little sanctimonious, and the idea was so novel, it made me wonder if it was possible.

Aren’t they the cutest baby dolls you ever seen? Marybeth whines, hugging one of the boxes.I nod to be a part of things but to be honest, I’d rather read a book than fuss with a baby doll.

“I’m just tired of how she’s always kissing Viktoria’s feet. She’s not even family.”“Says Garnett Pittman’s number one footlicker,” I said. Of course Frances ignored this. She liked to ignore big truths.

A few months later, Mama admitted, weeping, that the doctor’d told her I couldn’t bear children. I simply don’t remember losing any sleep over this.

—I’m asking for simplicity, for purity and ease of choice and no pressure. I’m asking for something that no politics is going to provide, something that probably you only get in preschool. I’m asking for preschool.


[2/2]

I wish the world were like this, if I just woke up and marked the food I’d be eating and it came to me later in the day. I suppose it is like that, except you have to pay for whatever you want to eat, so maybe what I’m asking for is communism, but I think it’s actually deeper than communism


[1/2]

Like in Animal Farm, which I read, all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others? Here in the real world, all equals are created animal, but some are more animal than others.

“It’s not about whether it will do me good. It’s that I want to go home.”
“You’ll be sold back into slavery,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“Because men are wicked.”

He repeated my name over and over, and then added, “I must hear you say it. Please. Say it. Say my name.”
“Chekura,” I said.
“Someone knows my name. Seeing you makes me want to live.”

One man asked, “Who is the sister who visits us?”
“Aminata. I am from Bayo, near Segu on the Joliba.”
In the darkness, men repeated my name and called out their own as I passed. They wanted me to know them. Who they were. Their names. That they were alive, and would go on living.

gliding over the unburied.



[3/3]

And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of

[2/3]

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary.


[1/2]

Thankfully, the public visits are only so often and leave me time for reading, to which I am addicted like some are to drink or to tobacco.

In the earliest days, when I was free and knew nothing other, I used to sneak outside our walled compound, climb straight up the acacia tree while balancing Father’s Qur’an on my head, sit way out on a branch and wonder how I might one day unlock all the mysteries contained in the book.

I’ve seen things I never expected to see and felt things I never expected to feel—not the least of them what I felt and still feel for the child sleeping down the hall from me. She’s my little guy now, I’m her big guy, and that’s the important thing. Nothing else seems to matter half so much.

I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.


[3/3]

We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things—fish and unicorns and men on horseback—but they are really only clouds.


[2/3]

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T.


[1/2]

He might have bought his false teeth out of a catalogue, but he wasn’t stupid.

Things with the power to scare the living shit out of you on a thundery midnight in most cases seem only interesting in the bright light of a summer morning.

Yankee men don’t hug—that’s a truism you can put right up there with tough guys don’t dance and real men don’t eat quiche—but Bill pumped my hand almost hard enough to slop coffee from a cup that was three-quarters empty, and gave me a hearty clap on the back.

So what? I asked myself. Even if it should be true, so what? Ghosts can’t hurt anyone.
That’s what I thought then.

Brenda Meserve had done her best, but any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.