We grow despite the horror that we feed upon our own tomorrow. We grow. - Maya Angelou

You have tried to destroy me
and though I perish daily,

I shall not be moved.

My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s’s from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with “That’s not unusual.” But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, “It be’s like that sometimes.

He watched her every move and when she left the room, his eyes allowed her reluctantly to go.