There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength. The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change. If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain. The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned pricks more deeply and draws more blood. The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder -- in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever. The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance. There is something more - the spirit, or the soul. I think that that quality encourages our courtesy and care and our minds. And mercy, and identity. | 
