"You sho is one aggravatin' nigger woman!"

She lifted her eyes to the door and saw him standing there bent over with laughter at her fright. She screamed at him.

"Where did Syke Jones git da 'oman from nohow?" Lindsay asked.

on't gimme no lip neither, else Ah'll throw 'em outand put mah fist up side yo' head to boot."

I tried. I looked at the chapters in the beginning and I saw one called "The Struggle for an Existence." Ah ha, I thought. At last! But what did I get? Something called the mistletoe which needs the apple tree and there's too many seeds and all are going to die except one . . . ! No, Hally.

ailing a maths exam isn't the end of the world, Sam. How many times have I told you that examination results don't measure intelligence?

Failing a maths exam isn't the end of the world, Sam. How many times have I told you that examination results don't measure intelligence?

Quietly.] Sam . . . [Sam stops and looks expectantly at the boy. Hally spits in his face. A long and heartfelt grown from Willie. For a few seconds Sam doesn't move.]

don't give a [crap] about my homework, so, for Christ's sake, just shut up about it. [Slamming books viciously into his school case.] Hurry up now and finish your work. I want to lock up and get out of here. [Pause. And then go where? Home-sweet [ . . . ] home. [Geez], I hate that word. [Hally goes to the counter to put the brandy bottle and comics in his school case. After a moment's hesitation, he smashes the bottle of brandy. He abandons all further attempts to hide his feelings. Sam and Willie work away as unobtrusively as possible.] Do you want to know what is really wrong with your lovely little dream, Sam/ It's not just that we are all bad dancers. That does happen to be perfectly true, but there's more to it than just that. You left out the cripples.

Back to reality.] Oh, [gosh], yes! I'd forgotten all about it. [Crap]! Remember my words, Sam? Just when you're enjoying yourself, someone or something will come along and wreck everything.

didn't say it was easy. I said it was simple - like in simple-minded, meaning mentally retarded. You can't exactly say it challenges the intellect.

WILLIE: I only got bus fare to go home. [He returns disconsolately to his work.] Love story and happy ending! [. . . .] Three nights now she doesn't come practice. I wind up gramophone, I get record ready and I sit and wait. What happens? Nothing. Ten o'clock I start dancing with my pillow. You try and practice romance by yourself, Boet Sam. Struesgod, she doesn't come tonight I take back my dress and ballroom shoes and I find me new partner. Size twenty-six. Shoes size seven. And now she's making trouble for me with the baby again. Reports me to Child Wellfed, that I'm not giving her money. She lies! Every week I am giving her money for milk. And how do I know is my baby? Only his hair looks like me. She's [messing]around all the time I turn my back. Hilda Samuels is a [bad woman]! [Pause.] Hey, Sam

ou got it. Tapdance or ballroom, it's the same. Romance. In two weeks' time when the judges look at you and Hilda, they must see a man and a woman who are dancing their way to a happy ending. What I sawwas you holding her like you were frightened she was going to run away.

try hard because it is hard.

the

the scourge of poverty and flickering prosperity that never seem to coalesce.

My grandmother hovers over the stove flame, fanning it as she melodically hums Kikuyu spirituals. She kneads the dough and places it on the stove, her veins throbbing with every movement: a living masterpiece painted by a life of poverty and motherhood. The air becomes thick with smoke and I am soon forced out of the walls of the mud-brick house while she laughs.

The rift between high school and college is wide, but it is one I must cross for those who have carried me to this point. The same hope that carried my parents over an ocean of uncertainty is now my fuel for the journey toward my future, and I go forward with the radical idea that I, too, can make it. Savoring each bite, I listen to the sound of neighbors calling out and children chasing a dog ridden with fleas, letting the cool heat cling to my skin.

“Because every time I see her I want to tell her I’m sorry your mother is alive, because it reminds me that mine is dead.”

So now Claire doesn’t know two things, where her shoes are or who this Aaron is who has a life she knows nothing about.

Claire is three? Four? Four drinks in to something bright pink that the host calls panty-dropper punch, one drink for every month her mother has been dead so far.

Claire’s mother dies in July. They bury her on a damp Tuesday when the ground is slimy from an afternoon thunderstorm.

Claire fears that she will lose both her mother and her other mother, but it turns out that it is worse to lose only one

A year later both of their mothers are sick. It starts slow, with both of them, and then quick quick quick. With Angela’s mother it is a lump, with Claire’s a vague malaise

She prints out a copy of the flag and tapes it to her dorm window. She calls the reporter from the student paper back and tells him she is simply celebrating her heritage, like any number of groups on campus encourage students to do. She affects a lilt to say so, but as soon as the words are out of her mouth she realizes that the affect is a mistake. She doesn’t sound like herself. She sounds like Angela.

Even now Claire recognizes renderings of the planet on sight, cloud-spotted, big and bright and banded, unspectacular until you consider all it holds in orbit.

Her father keeps long hours, and her mother has a certain formality; Claire loves her, but feels, in her presence, like a miniature adult, embarrassed by the silliness of her six-year-old desires.

She is strangely embarrassed by the picture, the way it turns her into someone else. She wasn’t wearing the bikini to bother black people