I understood that my family ...

I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
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 John Henrik Clarke

Quotes from the same author

If you struck your mother or your father, it was punishable by death because you struck at the whole society. You struck at the morality of the society itself. This is what we have lost.
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 John Henrik Clarke
You have to convince the adults that if a child is to learn his culture, he or she will have to see his mother and father reading about it, and explaining it to him. Then it gets a legitimacy it otherwise would never have. Until then, his learning is limited.
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 John Henrik Clarke
My mother really held the family together. She was a perfect example of the kind of black woman I would love to see again. She ruled my father with an iron hand, yet she barely ever raised her voice above a whisper.
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 John Henrik Clarke
I could pull all kinds of games on my mother. I couldn't pull any games on my father.
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 John Henrik Clarke
Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.
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 John Henrik Clarke