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. I was raped myself, when I was twelve, and my Mama never knew and I never told anybody. For, what could they do? (Lawyer.5)
This young girl lives a life deprived of safety, dignity, and kindness. The violence itself in the context of such deep poverty probably isn't shocking, but the sense of utter helplessness in the face of it is. It also comes as no surprise when Bubba persuades her to think that, nah, he didn't really rape her—she must have some feelings for a guy who pretends to be kind to her. Yeah, right.
Quote #2
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 petunias. (Petunias.5)
This comes from the diary of a woman who is eventually killed in an explosion caused by her son, who has just come home from Vietnam. There's a lot of irony in this short piece—not least of which is the name of the town: Tranquil, Mississippi.
Not only has the war in Vietnam literally come home with this woman's son, but there's also the lingering violence of white supremacy. At any rate, the peacefulness of the garden is undercut before the desecrated remains of her great-grandmother are dumped there as petunias can symbolize anger and resentment.
Quote #3
[…] I would have argued that the more ancient roots of modern pornography are to be found in the almost always pornographic treatment of black women, who, from the moment they entered slavery, even in their own homelands, were subjected to rape as the "logical" convergence of sex and violence. Conquest, in short. (Coming Apart.3)
Walker takes the opportunity in this story—and in "Porn" and "A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?"—to make clear that pornography = violence against women. This is because pornography not only objectifies women, it also plays on the stereotypes that promote the idea that rape and slavery are something desirable to women, even part of their fantasy lives. In this way of thinking, rape and sex become one thing—when in reality, the two do NOT overlap. Rape is violence, not sensuality.
Quote #4
He cannot imagine a woman being lynched. He has never even considered the possibility. Perhaps this is why the image of a black woman chained and bruised excites rather than horrifies him? (Coming Apart.57)
The hubby in Walker's "fable" is having his imagination stretched in unpleasant ways. But one good thing is coming from having his eyes opened: he's finally understanding why his porn mags so totally freak out his wife. And for her, it's validation: she's not the one who has to do the growing up in the relationship. She's right to have reacted badly to the violence implicit in those images.
Quote #5
It is the fact that the lynching of her body has never stopped that forces the wife, for the time being, to blot out the historical record. She is not prepared to connect her own husband with the continuation of that past. (Coming Apart.57)
It's a good thing that her husband is finally coming to terms with the hurt that his use of porn has caused her, but she's paying a high price for this victory. The weight of history is about to crush her spirit if she thinks about all the bodies of all the women who have been violated over time. The truth that her husband is participating in some way with this violent history cannot make its way into her brain at this time. Overload pending.
Quote #6
Imani felt her body had been assaulted by these events and was, in fact, considerably weakened, and was also, in any case, chronically anaemic and run down. Still, if she had wanted the baby more than she did not want it, she would not have planned to abort it. (Abortion.12)
Imani is in a bad place, physically and mentally, in her life. At this point, she feels that it's either the baby's life or her own—and this is why she chooses the abortion. But aside from the shocks that her body has had to deal with in the last few years, there's the issue of desire. Does Imani want this child? Her answer is clear at this point, though her consideration of the violence done to her unborn child weighs more on her after the procedure is done.
Quote #7
But assembly lines don't stop because the product on them has a complaint. Her doctor whistled, and assured her she was all right, and carried the procedure through to the horrific end. Imani fainted some seconds before that. (Abortion.32)
Although abortion is a legal procedure by the time Imani has her second one—and despite the fact that the facility is clean and welcoming—there's a kind of numbness to human suffering in the office. The lack of anesthesia is another assault on Imani's tired body, and it will be something that colors her response to the procedure in the weeks and years to come.
Quote #8
Whenever interracial rape is mentioned, a black woman's first thought is to protect the lives of her brothers, her father, her sons, her lover. A history of lynching has bred this reflex in her. (Luna.32)
Walker spends this entire story trying to work out a dilemma posed by Freddie Pye's rape of Luna: whom should she support and protect in this horrific scenario? While she believes Luna's account of the rape, there's still a part of her that wants to push back on her friend and deny that it could have happened.
Because of the violent history of lynchings of Black men in America—many of which were motivated by false accusations of rape—Walker finds a compassionate response to Luna slow in coming. In a truly just society, where a white woman's word doesn't have the power to destroy innocent Black men, she feels she could support Luna as she should.
Quote #9
[…] I was incensed to think of the hard struggle of my students to rid themselves of stereotype, to combat prejudice, to put themselves into enslaved women's skins, and then to see their struggle mocked, and the actual enslaved condition of literally millions of our mothers trivialized—because two ignorant women insisted on their right to act out publicly a "fantasy" that still strikes terror in black women's hearts. (Letter.19)
The two women Susan Marie refers to here are a lesbian couple featured on a TV show about sadomasochism. They are in a master-slave "relationship"—as if slaves had a great time being violently subjugated back in the day. Susan Marie argues that this is not acceptable, even in sex play, because it erases the centuries of violent history behind the image. It also makes it okay for others to see Black women as "happy slaves"—which any thinking person would know is not a thing that could exist.
Quote #10
He was not a dummy; he was stuffed. Like a bird, like a moose's head, like a giant bass. He was stuffed. (Elethia.6)
Elethia discovers the truth about Albert Porter's "effigy" in the window of a local restaurant where she works: it's actually Albert's stuffed corpse. It's a special kind of violence and degradation to haul a human corpse off to a taxidermist so that someone else can have a decoration for their whites-only restaurant. Uncle Albert is not only prevented from having a dignified burial, he's also become nothing more than an object or an animal, like a stuffed bear in a hunting lodge.