Black Scales

Famous quotes containing the words black and/or scales:

    Mighty few young black women are doin’ domestic work. And I’m glad. That’s why I want my kids to go to school. This one lady told me, “All you people are gettin’ like that.” I said, “I’m glad.” There’s no more gettin’ on their knees.
    Maggie Holmes, African American domestic worker. As quoted in Working, book 3, by Studs Terkel (1973)

    As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.
    Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)