Term
| "The knowledge that he had struck her seeped through him slowly and he was appalled but he couldn't drag his hands away from her face. He kept striking her and he thought with horror that something inside him was holding him, binding him to this act, wrapping and twisting about him so that he had to continue it." |
|
Definition
"Like a Winding Sheet" by Ann Petry
Context-Johnson has just beat up Mae after a very frustrating day.
Significance-Johnson attacks the easiest target who is a black woman. |
|
|
Term
| "What did I know, what did I know / of love's austere and lonely offices?" |
|
Definition
| "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden |
|
|
Term
| "How the days went / While you were blooming within me" |
|
Definition
| "Now That I Am Forever with Child" by Audre Lorde |
|
|
Term
| "We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, / Grayed in and gray. 'Dream' makes a giddy sound, not strong / Like 'rent,' 'feeding a wife,' 'satisfying a man.'" |
|
Definition
| "kichenette building" by Gwendolyn Brooks |
|
|
Term
| "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." |
|
Definition
| "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker |
|
|
Term
| "She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of on hundred and two." |
|
Definition
| "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" by Richard Wright |
|
|
Term
| "these hips have never been enslaved, / they go where they want to go / they do what they want to do." |
|
Definition
| "homage to my hips" by Lucille Clifton |
|
|
Term
| "'...I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open. |
|
Definition
| "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison |
|
|
Term
| "Listen, I'm going to be a doctor. I'm not worried about who I'm going to marry yet--if I ever get married." |
|
Definition
| "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorrain Hansberry |
|
|
Term
| "i wish them a strange town / and the last tampon." |
|
Definition
| "wishes for sons" by Lucille Clifton |
|
|
Term
| "What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" |
|
Definition
| "Harlem" by Langston Hughes |
|
|
Term
| "The South. Naxos. Negro education. Suddenly she hated them all." |
|
Definition
| "Quicksand" by Nella Larson |
|
|
Term
| "You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies" |
|
Definition
| "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou |
|
|
Term
| "With his ebony hands on each ivory key / He made that poor piano moan with melody. / O Blues!" |
|
Definition
| "The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes |
|
|
Term
| "You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched and getting to the North if we could and how to stay alive and still have a pinch of dignity too..." |
|
Definition
| "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorrain Hansberry |
|
|
Term
| "That was it, the guiding principle of her life in Copenhagen. She was incited to make an impression, a voluptuous impression. She was incited to inflame attention and admiration." |
|
Definition
| "Quicksand" by Nella Larson |
|
|
Term
| "And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child." |
|
Definition
| "Quicksand" by Nella Larson |
|
|
Term
| That night I dreamed I was at a circus with him and that he refused to laugh at the clowns no matter what they did. Then later he told me to open my brief case and read what was inside and I did, finding an official envelope stamped with the state seal; and inside the envelope I found another and another, endlessly, and I thought I would fall of weariness." |
|
Definition
| "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison |
|
|
Term
| "I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the / flow of human blood in human veins." |
|
Definition
| "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes |
|
|
Term
| "Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life." |
|
Definition
| "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin |
|
|
Term
| "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." |
|
Definition
| "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison |
|
|
Term
| "Here my Jim Crow education assumed quite a different form. It was no longer brutally cruel, but subtly cruel. Here I learned to lie, to steal, to dissemble." |
|
Definition
| "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" by Richard Wright |
|
|
