While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

#####

"I don't remember my mother because she died before I was born."
——Toni Morrison
—--Song of Solomon

I wake up disappointed to find myself still breathing, and I wonder …

A therapist explained, while I’d slept in utero, the chemicals that had ferried Mama’s depression through her blood were flowing through mine as well.

A Buddhist teacher said, “It’s depression, but not your depression.”

Poet Joy Harjo wrote that while she’d listened from an ancestor realm, she’d recognized her mother’s song and was called into this world by the music.

I wake up disappointed, cup my hands over my ears, and capture the refrain of Mama’s blood groaning through my veins.

High school. Before class began, our modern dance teacher put Blood, Sweat, and Tears on a turntable in the gym. Their song pulled me to my feet. Freed from the self-consciousness that usually plagued me, I swirled and swayed á la Martha Graham––a spinning wheel that had to go ’round.

Single years. On the dance floor, Stevie Wonder blasting “Living for the City,” men mistook my undulation for invitation. Slid their hands downward from my waist. I pushed them back up. They shoved their groins against my belly whenever Barry White moaned. I spun away, learned the rhythms of predator and prey.

Married. On television, The Temptations played in the background of a romcom. My husband creaked up from his La-Z-Boy, pulled me in to sway cheek to cheek as he crooned in my ear. “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day.” His palm pressed the words into my back, and his raised arm coaxed me to spin.

A miracle, the dance. I’m led wherever I need to go.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

*****
“The anger unjelled and flooded through her.”
———Toni Morrison
———Song of Solomon

At Chicago’s American Writers Museum, among the 100 author bookmarks offered to us word-loving souvenir hunters, only three black writers were represented, none of whom was Toni Morrison.