Home > Author > Angela Flournoy
21 " Slavery. Did there ever exist a more annoying way to try to make a modern-day black man feel like his troubles were insignificant, that he should be satisfied with the sorry hand society dealt him? Cha-Cha thought not. The line of reasoning was faulty; it was precisely because his grandfather’s father was born a slave that he should expect more from life, and more from this country, to make up for lost time at the very least. “I’m "
― Angela Flournoy , The Turner House
22 " He look like the type to bring a list with him into the bedroom, and he ain’t done makin love till he check off everything he got in his mind to do. "
23 " Cha-Cha favored short, earnest prayer, and he often wondered what took others so long., It had something to do with excess supplication, he suspected. He never presented a long list of specific requests to God, had always felt uncomfortable with the presumptuousness of "Ask and you shall receive." This might have been a result of pride, or his own middling ambition, but mostly Cha-Cha's prayers were a series of thank-yous and I'm sorrys. "
24 " She wanted to say something about how when you have a child it changes the way you feel when you’re alone, how you are never alone in the same way again because there is a live, independently thinking part of you out in the world that you can never fully push out of your awareness, even if you try. "
25 " She was here and already in the future looking back at here. Editing, perfecting, reliving it. "
26 " There was nowhere to put all of that self-loathing, no one place to stash the regret, but stillness, if it would just show up, could hold despair at bay. "
27 " Ain’t no haints in Detroit,” was more famous within the family than the story behind it. It first gained a place in the Turner lexicon as a way to refute a claim, especially one that very well might be true—a "
28 " Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit’s African American Community, 1918–1967 "
29 " ... too decisive a step among a family of people who talked about improving their health but generally left the things that ailed their bodies and their minds unattended. "
30 " Either she stopped calling the men or they her, the mutual interest petering out like the last few seconds of a song. "
31 " He had set it up this way, encouraged her to stop working, practically forbade her from working. He facilitated this metamorphosis into pushy caretaker, clingy nursemaid. It had made him feel like a man, an old-fashioned, all-capable man like his father. Now he felt like a child. Trapped in the cage of condescension and coddling that he'd built for himself. "
32 " but Cha-Cha thought the word was too clinical to truly convey the sort of secret, sad drinker Francis was. He took no joy in his drinking. It was as if he drank to punish himself for some misdeed. "
33 " She considered Ferndale, with its coffee shops and pet stores, a decent place for her daughter to live alone with a baby. It was home to a sizable gay community, and the trim, muscled white boys who jogged through the nearby park posed a stark contrast to the folks she’d seen on the street on her drive over. "
34 " as if being a single mom meant she was some solitary mule humping an unbearable burden. "
35 " Everybody else cain’t be wrong all the time. Sometimes it’s gotta be you. "
36 " Cha-Cha should have stopped running. Better to walk as if he’d been walking all along, then make a slow circle back to his truck. But he couldn’t stop himself. He wasn’t skilled at acting natural. "
37 " He had set it up this way, encouraged her to stop working, practically forbade her from working. He facilitated this metamorphosis into pushy caretaker, clingy nursemaid. It had made him feel like a man, an old-fashioned, all-capable man like his father. Now he felt like a child. Trapped in the cage of condescension and coddling that he’d built for himself. "
38 " the loud voice young people who feared the elderly used. "
39 " In the final years of his life, Francis spent most days on the back porch, eyeing his tomato patch with good-natured suspicion, listening to his teams lose on the radio, and smoking his pipe. He did these things, and he held Brianne. Right against his chest. Francis had nothing cute or remotely entertaining to offer babies; he didn’t say anything to them at all. Instead he gave them his heartbeat. Put their little heads on his chest and went about his day. Even the fussiest babies seemed to know better than to cut short their time with Francis via undue crying or excessive pooping. "