Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea by Nikki Giovanni

Author:Nikki Giovanni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

“We didn’t travel much during those days. I’m partial to trains because I’m from a teeny tiny town and the train would go through in the morning and come back in the evening, that’s the way I looked at it then. It was coming and going. I don’t know where I thought the tracks ended but it was like this great big play toy rumbling through and all I could think is I want to be on it. After Momma was killed and Daddy left town, but you know, we never did see Daddy again and I always thought they were together somewhere. I would dream about them and they would be all dressed up and happy. They would be smiling at me telling me to be a good girl. I guess I always thought they were together. I would cry in my sleep sometimes but now I know what I thought is they were dead only when you’re a little girl you don’t know that so I just saw them together. The man who killed my mother lived in town. I used to see him when I went to the store. People would talk and nudge and whisper. I always stared at him. He drank a lot but lots of folk drink a lot, and they didn’t kill my mother. She was pretty. I used to hear folk say he “forced” her. It took me the longest to understand what that meant. The people who reared me were good people. They didn’t want to talk about it much so I didn’t talk about it. One day my father, my adopted father, took me for a walk and told me everything. We never talked about it again. What could anyone do? Momma was dead. The white boy did it. And that was that. I must have been twelve, thirteen years old. I know now he told me because I had become what is called “a woman.” They wanted me to be careful. I wasn’t the one who was not “careful” but that’s the way we looked at things then. What they wanted was for me to be ugly and to carry myself in an ugly way so that nobody would think of me as…Well, you know. So I tried all my life to be unattractive. Clean. Neat. But unattractive. Wouldn’t you like a cup of coffee?”

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