Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you’re 52.
I gave my archive to Emory University because there’s a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he’s the editor.
Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.
My parents taught me service – not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.
Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.
My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?
I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.
I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‘See, you did it yourself.’
People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don’t.
We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.
If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.
