“But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it—taste it—sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base—everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.”

“What joyful noise, what Blackpentecostal aesthetic practice is, is the reckless abandonment, an escape and secretion into the flesh, a choreosonics that decidedly pronounces the sacredness of the black flesh.”

“Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Don’t pass it up. Use it.”

“What magic, to get the chance to live for whatever it is you were willing to die over. What magic to be able to see that I am worth my own words, that I deserve to enjoy the substance of my own audacity.”

“Laughter is very useable. It heals. It gives perspective. It creates breathing space when there seems to be nothing but soul-killing cramp and close-quartered suffocation. It signals the balance of that truism the elders palaver about – that nothing is so good it might not cause someone inconvenience, and nothing is so bad it might not yield a hopeful lesson. People with no capacity for laughter worry me. Like cops. […]

“Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.”

Wayward was so resonant with other terms – detour, errant, fugitive – and it is a word that brings to mind this practice of variance or deviation, so it seemed richly suggestive. In the chapter ‘Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible’, it’s connected to all of these other words like anarchy and queer and unruly, but there was something about the gendered character of it that was exactly right, it seemed both old-fashioned and absolutely contemporary. The wayward girl is the girl who won’t succumb to or obey the gender script. The challenge when describing black women’s lives, black women’s radical practices, is that they’re always subsumed or asterisked to a larger category. I just needed to say no, their practice is the category, you know? And this notion of being a footnote to everything else is what waywardness enabled me to challenge, it seemed an organic term for describing the radical and disobedient imaginary of young black women – so that’s why I liked it. How do we understand black radical imaginaries without understanding how central girls and women are to those projects?

“Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe...It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.”

“In the hallway, you wonder will the world always be as narrow as this, two walls threatening to squeeze and crush you into nothingness. So you imagine other worlds, sometimes not even better, but at least different from this.”

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

“try to piecemeal the peace stitch together some sleep and relax for the reap for the road for the real stuff.”

“I think that maybe if we can guard ourselves and each other, if we can keep from losing our minds alone in quiet rooms and can at least lose them side by side, we may live through the year.”