Excerpts:

From Black Girl in Paris (2000)

Riverhead Books

Museum Guide

Paris, September 1986. Early morning. She is lying on her back in a hard little bed with her eyes closed, dreaming in French. Langston was here. There is a black girl in Paris lying in a bed on the fifth floor of a hotel in the Latin Quarter. Her eyes are closed against the soft pink dawn. Delicate maps of light line her face, tattoo the palms of her hands, the insides of her thighs, the soles of her feet like lace. Jimmy was here. She sleeps while small, feminine hands plant a bomb under the seat of a train headed toward the city of Lyon.

James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera all had lived in Paris as if it had been part of their training for greatness. When artists and writers spoke of Paris in their memoirs and letters home it was with reverence. Those who have been and those who still dream mention the quality of the light, the taste of the wine, the joie de vivre, the pleasures of the senses, a kind of freedom to be anonymous and also new. I wanted that kind of life even though I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.

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From Soul Kiss (1997)

Riverhead Books

The first evening Mama doesn't come back, I make a sandwich with leaves from her goodbye letter. I want to eat her words. I stare at the message written on the stiff yellowed paper as if the shaky scrawl would stand up and speak to me, Mama loves you. Wait here for me. I want her to take back the part about waiting. After crushing the paper into two small balls I flatten them with my fist, then stuff them into the envelope my aunt Faith gave me after Mama had gone. I feel weak as water and stone cold as I sit with my legs dangling over the edge of the thick mattress on the high iron-frame bed, reading by the dim lamplight. I unfold the tiger-print scarf Mama gave me and lay in its center the goodbye sandwich, a small book of rhymes, a biscuit from dinner wrapped in wax paper, and her pink radio that fits in the palm of my hand... After a while I lie down on the bed with the scarf across my face, breathing in the bergamot smell of my mother's hair, tasting bitter tears. I take small bites of the sandwich, careful to taste every word she left me, even the ones I don't understand, then swallowed each with a tear or two.

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From the Big Mama Stories (1989)

Firebrand Books

“If you don't remember nothing else I tell you, baby, you remember this; If you got to dance or dream or anything at all, take it a step at a time and don't let nothing and nobody get in your way when you doing right. I ain't saying it's gonna be easy, but we all got a dance to do. You remember this, you hear?”

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