'...She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love.' (p155) - Edwidge Danticat

Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do. We think we are people who might not have been able to go to school at all, who might never have learned to read and write. We think we are the children of people who have lived in the shadows for too long.

"...The things one does, one should do out of love." (chapter 17 p118)

Perhaps, just as Alice Walker writes of her own forebears in her essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," my blood ancestors-unlike my literary ancestors-were so weather-beaten, terror-stricken, and maimed that they were stifled. As a result, those who somehow managed to create became, in my view, martyrs and saints.