My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.
Interpretation
This quote speaks to the profound connection between family and community, particularly in the face of adversity.
Jesmyn Ward reflects on her family's long-standing ties to a working-class background and the strong sense of belonging in a small community. The struggle of poverty is intertwined with a deep commitment to one's family, highlighting how such socio-economic conditions shape the decisions and experiences of individuals within close-knit environments. The inability or reluctance to evacuate during crises underscores the inseparability of family ties and communal identity in facing hardships.
In practice
This quote can be shared when discussing community values during challenging times.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
Talk with your daughters, Play with your sons. You need to be a better friend to them than anyone else. This society offers lots of evil friends. Before they make those kinds of friends, they need to find their best friend in you.
Once a month we have 'dessert for dinner' night. I'll make four separate desserts. They'll come home from school and eat as much cake and custard and ice cream as they can physically get in their guts. Because sometimes I think, let them just be children.
Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.
I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life.
Everything, I just wanted to be like my father. And, as I grew within the music, I kind of became myself which was even more like my father, only without me trying though.
Parents, what are your children learning from your worship? Do they see the same excitement as when you go to a basketball game? Do they see you prepare for worship as you do for a vacation? Do they see you hungry to arrive, seeking the face of the Father? Or do they see you content to leave the way you came?.....They are watching. Believe me. They are watching.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.