I Was No Cherokee. I Was No

Twenty Years After We Had Left So Fierce And Proud, We Were All Right Back Where We Had Started, Yoked To Each Other And The Same Old Drama.

One Of The Strengths I Derive From My Class Background Is That I Am Accustomed To Contempt.

I Wanted To Start Over Completely, To Begin Again As New People With Nothing Of The Past Left Over. I Wanted To Run Away From Who We Had Been Seen To Be, Who We Had Been... It's The First Thing I Think Of When Trouble Comes - The Geographic Solution. Change Your Name, Leave Town, Disappear, Make Yourself Over. What Hides Behind That Impulse Is The Conviction That The Life You Have Lived, The Person You Are, Is Valueless, Better Off Abandoned, That Running Away Is Easier Than Trying To Change Things, That Change Itself Is Not Possible.

... Suffering Does Not Ennoble. It Destroys. To Resist Destruction, Self-hatred, Or Lifelong Hopelessness, We Have To Throw Off The Conditioning Of Being Despised, The Fear Of Becoming The They That Is Talked About So Dismissively, To Refuse Lying Myths And Easy Moralities, To See Ourselves As Human, Flawed, And Extraordinary. All Of Us Extraordinary

He Never Said "don't Tell Your Mama." He Never Had To Say It. I Did Not Know How To Tell Anyone What I Felt, What Scared Me And Shamed Me... (109)