Self Portrait

“By the time I got to Birmingham, its great story was already frozen in stone. Kelly Ingram Park is a place of statues now, quiet, peaceful, unless you are one of those people to whom history screams. Old black men sit on the park benches to feel the sun on their face, and discuss whether or not that statue of the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior really looks like him. It stands on ground, what many people in this city see as holy ground, where civil rights marchers were pummeled by batons, blasted with fire hoses and gnawed by dogs, on the orders of a one-eyed little man named Bull Connor. A few feet away is the venerable old Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where a Klansman’s bomb killed four little girls. History might not scream to a white man here, but it whispers.” (157)

“You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.” (147)

I don’t know if this line is especially great, but one of the previous owners of my book must have loved it: they highlighted it at least twice, practically painting the bottom of the page in deep, yellow strokes. It was the only part of the book any of them marked, and while I don’t mark my books these days (my thoughts and my favorite lines never feel that definitive) shortly after I bought this book in 2012 I did identify the lines at the beginning of the book as being from “Pancho and Lefty,” surely to prove to quietly but unambiguously prove to the world how cultured I am.

“I let only one person drive her, Patrice Curry, the prettiest girl in school, for exactly one mile.” (112)

“I rage against things I cannot change, and let things that I could change, just slide.” (110)

“My favorite Bible story is the story of the widow’s mite, of the poor woman who gave two small coins to the Temple. Rich merchants gave much more in tribute, but God saw her gift as greater because it was everything she had. So God blessed her.” (107)

“My momma did not lecture much, but when she did it was about false pride. My daddy had it. It was what made him sit for hours and shine his shoes or sharpen his knife, and forget to care about things that were really important, like whether his wife had money for groceries. She said, now and then, that I had my daddy’s pride. I cared too much about appearances, about the façade that faced the rest of the world. I would have paid more attention to her if I had not known for some time it was precisely that same kind of pride that kept here a prisoner in that little house. But I guess being a momma has little to do with logic.” (105)