Home > Author > Ashley C. Ford
41 " It wasn’t lost on me that I mostly spoke my truth in the spaces where my family was absent. "
― Ashley C. Ford , Somebody's Daughter
42 " It made sense it would take someone I’d never noticed who came out of nowhere to love me. "
43 " Do me a favor, Ashley? When you write about you and me? Just tell the truth. Your truth. Don’t worry about nobody’s feelings, especially not mine. You gotta be tough to tell your truth, but it’s the only thing worth doing next to loving somebody. "
44 " I am freer than you and that is worth all of the things I don't have. "
45 " I trusted my mother to deliver the violence she’d promised upon anyone she believed violated something that belonged to her. She explained it was her job to protect me from those sick people, and so it was important for me to tell her the truth, so she could do her job. But telling the truth wasn’t enough. I had to make her believe me with my voice, and my body, and my face, which always seemed to be doing the wrong thing in those moments. I thought, if I can’t make her believe me, somebody could die. Somebody could die because my mother refused to believe I’m not a liar, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise. "
46 " It reminded me of my father’s letters telling me I was the best, the greatest, the most beautiful, and the only one. I didn’t believe a word, but I believed that someone else did, and as long as I could maintain that, it would be enough for me. "
47 " These things catch fire without letting each other go. "
48 " We don’t give up on our people. We don’t stop loving them.” She looked into my face, her eyes watering at the bottoms. “Not even when we’re burning alive. "
49 " Living with my grandmother and her father in the fields of Missouri, I learned to think only of myself for hours at a time. Spending half a day alone, free of the company of people who would distract me from my being, I learned to think about who I was, who I was becoming, and what I wanted. "
50 " Grandpa sat at the table, sorting the edible parts of an almost-dead frog. His fingers bent and popped its sinewy limbs, separating the muscle from bone. The nearly departed performed a table dance for me. I was unimpressed. I wanted to be anywhere else in the world. "
51 " We smiled at each other, big real smiles, and I forgot anything and anyone else. "
52 " I stared at them, doing my best to ignore the small splashing sound coming from an old white bucket next to the refrigerator. He’d caught a catfish earlier the same day. It had not wanted to be caught. "
53 " Don't. Ever. Give. A. Man. Your. Money. "
54 " Grandpa told me stories that would get hung up old, useless, and dry against my ribs, marking me as his kin. "
55 " You'll learn to gut a fish like a man. Then, you won't need one. "
56 " I thought Grandpa broke and ate everything that might love him. I didn't want to sit here and learn to do the same. But I was already here, gutting a fish like man as I knew what that meant. "
57 " The feeling started in my hand and creeped out into my already shifting body. I was not safe. Nothing about me was safe from drowning in the open air. It was my first panic attack. My Grandpa watched it happen until it was over, then he drove me home. "
58 " When she corrected me, she did so with obvious care, and that counted for a lot with me. Kids can always tell the difference between adults who want to empower them, and adults who want to overpower them. She was the former. "
59 " We had been in a relationship for six years, and were best friends for longer. He was my safest place, and he knew that was the case, had seen it for himself. We didn’t know, back then, there are about a million ways to love and be loved by another person. We thought what we had, the way we had it, was the only way it could be. We were stuck. "
60 " Yes, Ashley, she told me. Now why are you still in my face?” She knew what I wanted, and she wanted me to know it would not be mine. We were locked in a power struggle, not that I would have known to call it that, and I was confused because I did not want power from my mother. I wanted her to acknowledge the pain in my body and heart. "