How we cite our quotes: (Story.Section.Paragraph) or (Story.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The place stunk, especially in the summer. And children were always screaming and men were always cussing and women were always yelling about something…It was nothing for a girl or woman to be raped. (Lawyer.5)
The poverty and violence of the narrator's early life are appalling. And it's more appalling that so many people in her life are complicit in the situation, including Bubba and his white-supremacist father. The combination of squalor, trauma, and loss make it a whole lot easier for the narrator to take the action she does in the end in order to take some control of her life.
Quote #2
My daddy's grandmamma was a slave on the Tearslee Plantation. They dug up her grave when I started agitating in the Movement. One morning I found her dust dumped over my verbena bed, a splintery leg bone had fell among my petunia. (Petunias.40)
Okay, y'all—the desecration of a grave is never acceptable. But it seems a whole other level of injustice to disturb the bones of a former slave to retaliate against a descendant fighting for her civil rights. But here's a hard truth that Walker reiterates: America isn't always a civil place for everyone.
Quote #3
"If a Black man had sex with a consenting white woman, it was rape." [Why am I always reading about, thinking about, worrying about, my man having sex with white women? she thinks, despairingly, underneath the reading.] "If he insulted a white woman by looking at her, it was attempted rape." (Coming Apart.59)
It's hard to read this book in part because it makes us face a lot of hard truths. This is one of them: that Black men face extreme danger and oppression because of white male fear of interracial sexuality. The violent history of Black men being lynched by whites takes center stage in Walker's "Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells," where Walker doesn't know how to react to a white friend confiding that she'd been raped by a Black man.