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"There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, 'Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind. She looked at my face, how it flowed with sorrow and doubt, and she said, 'You don't believe me? Where you think these shoulder blades of yours come from, girl?'We weren't some special people who had lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren't going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn't any magic to it."
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Explore more quotes by Sue Monk Kidd
"Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket."
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"Mr. Vesey, though, he didn't like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward's way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn't mean a thing. I had to side with him on that."
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