Art gives us the opportunity to have clarity as well as hope that we might be able to survive a situation, or hope that we can find a way out of it without too much more injury to ourselves.
There was quite a ruckus about the seven ladies in their simple colored dresses. I was truly dumbfounded that I was, right then and there, deemed the biggest threat to black men since cotton pickin', and not all women were in my corner, either.
I hadn't published a book of poetry in over a decade because I've been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, 'Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.'
There was nothing to aspire to, no one to honor. Sojourner Truth wasn't a big enough role model for me. I couldn't go around abolishing slavery.
I had - there were three strokes, and I lost my ability to read and write and speak, and it really put me by the wayside for a number of years.
Luckily, my father and my mother liked us to talk, so they encouraged us to talk, so that the girls in my house, they're all very powerful speakers and powerful agents of their own will, as is my brother.
