“My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron.”

“I ain't good looking
And my hair ain't curls
But my mother she give me something
It's going to carry me through this world.”

“These days everything went through the filter of knowing that she might be dying. And not a lot made it through.”

“Saying my story makes me want to change it, make it sound pretty the way I do with the stories I tell the workers. I'd like it to have a beginning as grand as a ball and an ending in a whisper, like a mother tucking in a child for sleep.”

“I came to the riverbank. The sand underfoot crunches and sounds like my grandmother sighing. She is fond of chattering endlessly, although no-one understands her. If you ask, Grandmother, what did you say? She will look up absentmindedly and, after a while, say, oh, you’re back from school? Are you hungry? There are sweet potatoes in the bamboo steamer. When she chatters it is best not to interrupt; she is talking about when she was a young woman. But if you eavesdrop from behind her chair, she seems to be saying. It’s hidden, it’s hidden, everything is hidden, everything… All these memories are making noises in the sand under your feet.”

“Go to bed, Cammie,” my aunt ordered, sounding exactly like my mother.
“No,” I said, sounding exactly like my aunt.”

“I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was OK and to thank her, because I'm glad I didn't end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and she went through a lot to have me.”

“down from his brow
she ran his curls
like thick hyacinth clusters
full of blooms”

“She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.”

“I would've held your mother's hand on the day you was born.
She runs through my veins like a long black river and rattles my cage like a thunderstorm.”