Toni Morrison

A fully dressed woman walked out of the water.

She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree.

All day and all night she sat there, her head resting on the trunk in a position abandoned enough to crack the brim in her straw hat.

Everything hurt, but her lungs most of all.

sopping wet and breathing shallow.

She spent those hours trying to negotiate the weight of her eyelids.

The day breeze blew her dress dry.

The night wind wrinkled it.

Nobody saw her emerge or came accidentally by.

If they had, chances are they would have hesitated before approaching her.

Not because she was wet or dozing or had what sounded like asthma.

but because amid all that, she was smiling.

It took her the whole of the next morning to lift herself from the ground and make her way through the woods, past a giant temple of boxwood, to the field, and then the yard of the slate-gray house.

Exhausted again, she sat down on the first handy place, a stump not far from the steps of 124.

By then, keeping her eyes open was less of an effort.

She could manage it for a full two minutes or more.

Her neck, its circumference no wider than a parlor service saucer, kept bending, and her chin brushed the bit of lace edging her dress.

Well, the slavery stuff was terrible because it's one thing to sort of know historically, abstractly, conceptually, generally what it was like, but imagining that life, which is sort of entering it

very fundamentally, is very, very difficult for me.

And the only thing that made it really possible to stay there, you know, was just little things, just knowing that you couldn't see your husband in the daytime, only at night, only when the sun was out, because people worked from sunup to sundown.