Dust Tracks on a Road: Chapters 5–8

There were no discreet nuances of life on Joe Clarke’s porch. There was open kindnesses, anger, hate, love, envy and its kinfolks, but all emotions were naked, and nakedly arrived at.

I happened to hear a man talking to another in a chiding manner and say, “To save my soul, I can’t see what you fooled with her for..."

The usual rejoinder was, “Oh, she’s got enough to go on. No matter how much wood you chop, a woman will burn it all up to get a meal. If she got a couple of pieces, she will make it do. If you chop up a whole boxful, she will burn every stick of it. Pay her no mind.”

‘‘Oh, she’s just playing,” Mama said indulgently.

‘‘Playing! Why dat lil’ heifer is lying just as fast as a horse can trot. Stop her! Wear her back-side out. I bet if I lay my hands on her she’ll stop it. I vominates (abominate) a lying tongue.”

The sunlight where I had lost them was still of Midas gold, but that which touched me where I stood had somehow turned to gilt.

Now and then when the sky is the right shade of blue, the air soft, and the clouds are sculptured into heroic shapes, I glimpse them for a moment, and believe again that the halcyon days have been.

She did not even cry out when she heard herself being called and could discern the moving lanterns.

Some said that he had been waylaid by three other young fellows and killed in a jealous rage.

I was nine years old, and even though she had talked to me very earnestly one night, I could not conceive of Mama actually dying.

Anything else would have been sacrilege, and no nine-year-old voice was going to thwart them.

My father was with the mores. He had restrained me physically from outraging the ceremonies established for the dying.

If I took time enough to match my stockings, I wouldn’t have time to be trying to listen in on grown folk’s business. These venerable old ladies were anywhere from fifteen to eighteen.

She wanted two dolls instead of one? Bless her little heart! A cheeky little rascal!

He acted like he was satisfied with some stale, old, decrepit woman of twenty-five or so.

I comforted myself with the thought that he would cry his eyes out when I would suddenly appear before him, tall and beautiful and disdainful and make him beg me for a whole week before I would give in and marry him, and of course fire all of those old half-dead teachers who were hanging around him.

This torrid love affair was conducted from a hole in the ground behind the laundry and came to an abrupt end.

Oh, the perfidy, the deceit of the man to whom I had given my love and all my lovely letters in the hole behind the laundry!

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves.

This wordless feeling went with me from the time I was ten years old until I achieved a sort of competence around twenty.

I was in school off and on, which gave me vagrant peeps into the light, but these intervals lacked peace because I had no guarantee that they would last.

Cally flounced on back to the kitchen, and he got up and hauled the children upstairs.

She put the steak away in the ice-box ostentatiously, just daring me with her eyes to cheep about it.

He sort of apologized when he said the children were so attached to me that he hated to get rid of me on their account. Not once did he say a word to me. So Cally was mollified to an extent. If she had not gotten rid of me, her rank had been recognized at any rate.

This was not just another escapade which Mama would maul his knit for in private and smooth out publicly.

Then, too, a certain amount of the prestige every wife enjoys arises out of where the man got her from and how. She lacked the comfort of these bulwarks too.

She must have decided that if she could destroy his children she would be safe, but the opposite course would have been the only extenuating circumstance in the eyes of the public.

She told me not to come down to the train with an old dilapidated suitcase for that would make her ashamed. So the upshot of it was that she advanced me the money to buy one, and then paid me for the week.

It was not that my grammar was bad, it was the idioms. They did not know of the way an average southern child, white and black, is raised on simile and invective.

It was not that my grammar was bad, it was the idioms. They did not know of the way an average southern child, white and black, is raised on simile and invective.

Since that stratum of the southern population is not given to book-reading, they take their comparisons right out of the barn yard and the woods.

They would think up more, like having one of the men contrive to walk down the aisle with me and then everybody lift shocked eyebrows, pretend to blush and wink at each other, and sigh, “Zora! Zora! What would your mother say?’’

I got a scrap book, and everybody gave me a picture to put in it. I pasted each one on a separate page and wrote comments under each picture. This created a great deal of interest, because some of the comments were quite pert.

He had the temerity to juggle the box-office reports to his own profit and got fired.

Johnnie, her first born, was homely. One thing struck me forcibly; his teeth had either not come out of his gums very far, or they had been sawed off.

In addition to the dandelions in the clothespins there was a jaunty little nosegay of them pinned on one leg of a pair!

I was inside throwing conniptions until his mother reminded me through her chuckles that nobody would know my panties from anybody else’s.

The outwardly gay house had turned into a spectral place because I had loaned Johnnie two dollars.

Sing them with a wistfulness. The arias which they would sing at the Metropolitan or La Scala as they had once hoped actively, and still hoped passively even as the hair got thinner and the hips got heavier.

Those experiences, though vicarious, made me see things and think.