1
" What was up I didn’t know. But the morning of Carnival, when I was lighting those candles, these two mockingbirds, you see, they flew from the skies, rested on my porch, watched my hands they did. I looked at their bodies. So pretty, shaped like swollen arrows. To them I said, “Welcome.” Who these birds were, I did not know. But mockingbirds don’t fly up every day and watch me light candles, no. So I said to myself, Soliel Marie, something could be up. A breeze blew through. I sucked in as much of the clear wind as I could. I wanted it to sit in my body. Swirl through, find my heart and my bone, I told the breeze. The two mockingbirds right then, lifted wings through the air, them. Then I knew. I opened my mouth so the breeze could leave. Believe me, yes, I felt the sign was definite. Change was coming. "
― , Sugar Cage
2
" At home I pulled all my blinds. I said to my Grandmama and Mama this and that. I said to them, You believed in signs. I remember that well. I remembered how my Mama could read the steam coming off a soup kettle. Especially if it had good, fresh marrow in it. And if I didn’t feel good, Grandmama would go out and bring in fistfuls of wild herbs. She’d throw them in broths and read, depending on my ailment. She was half doctor, half priest. I said to her once when I had the croup and she was making me drink something that had grass in it, I said, “Grandmama, are you making me drink magic?”
“No baby, this is good ole-fashioned hoodoo. "
― , Sugar Cage
3
" I am a bird and what flows in my bones is swamp water. And my Mama and Papa, no longer are they dead. No, they are voices that rise out of the swamp mud, mist floating between the palmetto leaves, spirits whispering in the fog during twilight hours. They fill me.
I don’t have no mirrors to look at myself so that I know the truth. I don’t have no dollars clinging to my pockets to tell me what is and what isn’t. I just have these voices, and these fields, and my loa. So for now, that is why I stay. Not because I am dumb. Not because I can’t be nothing else but a field flea, as Uncle calls us.
Hear me now. I know things even other mambos do not know. My Haitian mama, she too was a mambo, she married a Seminole, Papa. He taught her all the Indian ways. And they taught me. So, I know it all. "
― , Sugar Cage
